I like the adventure of making paintings. I like paint in all its glorious variation: thick, thin, smooth, gritty, opaque, translucent, glossy, matte. Material stuff that I can manipulate directly on a surface. Making art takes me to places nothing else does. It satisfies me like nothing else does.  While I am a landscape painter at heart, I need the open-ended-ness of a non-objective painter. Color and authenticity of feeling comes first.

My newest work is a synthesis of a lot of what I have been working on for all of my career. And one could easily say these are “abstract landscapes” and that would feel true. I will leave it to the art writers and art historians to hash out the details and add their own thoughts and perceptions. Artists are most often not the most reliable commenters on their work. So with that grain of salt…

At 73 I feel like I have come to a place where my work is integrating the main concerns and influences that have occupied my studio practice forever in a way that satisfies my demanding standards more fully than ever before. If I attempt to list those influences the task becomes overwhelming since it is really what I would call all great painting and sculpture all the way back to the caves. There are the more obvious influences of what is loosely called painterly painting which includes all of the best Old Master, Impressionist, Pre-War American Modernists, Abstract Expressionist, Color Field, Post Painterly Abstraction, etc, but also includes African and Oceanic tribal sculpture and architecture, Early American quilt and folk art design, Children’s art primarily within the 4-8 age group, and more. I absorb influences voraciously.

My sea stack, and related abstract landscape pictures occupied me for quite some time and led me to these newest pictures that began in late 2024 and continue into 2025. But there are also paintings from the 80’s and 90’s that were heading in or hinting at this direction. Even my Tree Portraits and Color Stack series, which I will continue to follow up on, offer fodder for these newest pictures. Again, the art historians and art writers can have a field day. While I have a healthy deep satisfaction with these new paintings, I know that the internal demands I always feel will continue, as always, to drive me and my work as the paintings unfold - one by one.


For me, Art along with Science and Religion is part of the triangle of human seeking, expression and knowing. If the newest physics is correct, then our consciousness and the universe are inextricably bound together; one cannot exist without the other. Our reality snaps into being every microsecond that we observe it, as wave functions collapse into the physical world we know. If we have done our work well, then we have opened up our consciousness and enabled access to something far bigger than ourselves.

"Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety. The Universe is the externization of the soul."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, Second Series

At its best, art transcends its apparent subject matter and illuminates the human spirit and our connection to the universe. Sounds highfalutin but feels true.

Scott Bennett, March, 2025