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 non-objective art. Color and authenticity of feeling comes first.

I’ve been painting for over 50 years and 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 a wide range of sources that includes works from Medieval times into the Renaissance through Impressionism, Pre-War American Modernism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, Post Painterly Abstraction, African and Oceanic tribal sculpture and architecture, Early American quilt and Folk Art design, Children’s art, and of course my contemporary colleages and peers. My personal connection to the natural world feels like the backbone of my inspiration whether I am making representational or more abstract pictures.

The Sea Stack variations and related abstract landscape pictures were predominant from 2016 through 2025 and led me to these newest pictures that continue into 2026. But there are also paintings from the 80’s and 90’s that were heading in or hinting at this direction. My Tree Portrait and Color Stack series and perhaps even my Botanical paintings offer fodder for these newest pictures.

In 2024 and 2025 I made a series of 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. These gradually morphed into compositions where I am playing with a broader range of placement with the collage elements and more variety with the surrrounding color fields. The variations continue to expand.

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.

For me, Art along with Science and Religion are 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.


"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

Scott Bennett, May, 2026