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.
At 73 I feel like I have come to a place where my work is integrating the elements and influences that have occupied my studio practice from the beginning, in a way that satisfies my demanding standards more fully than before. My influences come from great painting and sculpture all the way back to the caves. “Great” is simply what moves me the most. This would include Renaissance, Old Master, Impressionist, Pre-War American Modernist, Cubist, 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, my personal connection to the natural world,…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 Portrait and Color Stack series, which I continue to follow up on, offer fodder for these newest pictures where a simplified format contains an expanse of a thinly applied single appearing color and a thickly painted collaged shape placed toward the bottom of the picture with poured flat color areas on the sides and bottom (some exceptions). In most cases there are areas of thick paint extruding from under the edges of the collaged piece. There are variations I have yet to follow up on.
While I have a healthy deep satisfaction with these new paintings, I know that the internal demands I feel will continue to drive me and my work as the paintings unfold and change - one by one.
"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
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.
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, May, 2025