Susan G. Scott
Susan G. Scott RCA is a Canadian artist known for contemporary figurative painting. Her work is found in national and international public collections including the Canada Council for the Arts, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Collection du Fonds régional d'art contemporain d’Île-de-France in Paris, Canada - Israel Cultural Foundation in Jerusalem and Houston Baptist University in Texas. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2013.
Throughout her career, Scott explored various themes, styles and mediums within painting. She uses "traditional codes, often blending them with those of other media – altering her format or adding text – to bend the narrative away from passivity towards communication." Following a brief period of gestural landscapes in the early 1980s, Scott focused on narrative figurative painting with protagonists in dramatic mise en scene inspired by literature or art history. For curator Jane Young, her work "conveys much emotional information through the colours, compositions and titles used." Art historian and critic Hedwidge Asselin noted her skill with light: "the painter’s gaze encompass the forms and volumes, the distances in space, the colors, harmonies, contrasts and values". Described by curator Joan Murray as a "master of colour", in 2014 Scott set aside the figure to convey – in gestural brush stroke on a white ground – "nature as a living, changing subject."
Early life and education
Susan G. Scott was born in Montreal in October 28, 1949. The daughter of Canadian Nathan Scott and American Betty Greenberg, she grew up in Montreal and, at age 14, first took drawing from Canadian artist Dennis Burton. In 1966 she attended the Pratt Institute in New York City and studied under figurative artist Sidney Tillim. The following year, she returned to Montreal to take painting under John Fox at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts and print making under Albert Dumouchel at the École des Beaux-Arts. She completed her fourth-year art diploma at the Boston Museum School and was awarded a summer scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. While at Skowhegan, she met students from the New York Studio School and enrolled there the following semester. At the Studio School, Scott was introduced to the philosophy of artist Hans Hoffman and, influenced by visiting artists Alex Katz and Philip Guston, continued to draw and paint from observation. She graduated from the New York Studio School with a Masters of Fine Art equivalent. Scott taught painting at the Emily Carr College of Art, Banff School of Fine Arts, University of Victoria, Mount Allison University, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and, since 1994, at Concordia University in Montreal.Career
1980 - 2000While teaching at the Emily Carr College of Art, Scott's gestural harbourfront scenes caught the attention of Christopher Varley who curated her 1982 solo exhibition Vancouver Series at the Edmonton Art Gallery. In 1983 Scott's Kafka-inspired, polaroid-format figurative series Description of a Struggle was exhibited at Bernard Jacobson Gallery. This series – with figures likened to Matisse and Picasso – was included in the touring exhibition Susan G. Scott: Works from 1974 to 1983 viewed at the Surrey Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Saidye Bronfman Centre, Justine M. Barnicke Gallery, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre. In 1988 Scott experimented with layered glazes on a toned ground, imprimatura, in the series Blindman's Bluff. Based on Goya's painting of the same name, the exhibition toured Galerie Nikki Diana Marquardt and, in 1989-91, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery, and Daniel Saxon Gallery. In 1993 Scott's feminist interpretation of Joseph and His Brothers The Dreamer Series – influenced by Harold Bloom's and David Rosenberg's Book of J – exhibited at Galerie Michel Tétreault.
2000 -
During the early 2000s, Scott – inspired by Cocteau's celebrated novel Les enfants terribles – created a sequential series "of characters who appear from painting to painting". Exhibited with large wall drawings, hand-painted text and sketchbooks at the Visual Art Centre in 2004, the series also toured the Maison de la Culture, Clarington Art Centre Dalhousie University Art Gallery and the Justine M. Barnicke Gallery. At this time, Scott's monochromatic portraits of children – with "frantic action figures looming out of the background as if they were figments of the child's teeming imagination," – were favorably reviewed by Gary Michael Dault in The Globe and Mail. In 2008 Scott incorporated her vocations – artist and teacher – in the two diptych series Young Artist and Student Days. These paintings – investigations of subject matter – were exhibited at Galerie d'Art du Parc and FOFA Gallery of Concordia University. In 2011, Scott's large scale Oasis Series – of children within colour-saturated landscapes – was exhibited at Galerie Eric Devlin. Following trips to Asia and the study of Chinese philosophy and landscape techniques, Scott returned to "quick light brush strokes" on a white, stone-paper ground – for the 2014 water series Notations – exhibited at Beaux-arts des Amériques.
Scott, a dual Canada-US citizen, lives in Montreal and maintains a summer residence in Vermont. She meets regularly with the Vermont Northeast painters group and teaches in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University. She is married to production designer François Séguin and they have two children.
Recognition and Contribution
In 1982 Edmonton Art Gallery curator Christopher Varley wrote: "Rather than simplifying her work to achieve pictorial or expressive unity – and suppressing drawing, spatial and compositional complexity, and strong contrasts in value, chroma or hue to do it – she seeks unity within complexity, and loads her paintings and drawings with a wide variety of pictorial incidents." Best known for her figurative work, in 1984 curator Jane Young of Surrey Art Gallery noted: "Scott experiments with public statements about personal emotions, exposing and exploiting the incongruity of socially prescribed behaviour which excludes the expression of our most deeply felt emotions. She does this by exaggerating the emotional content of the painting by using specific colours and compositional motifs." In the Los Angeles review of Scott's AIDS series Forgotten Histories, Marlena Donohue wrote: "These paintings crackle with the intense heat of sensuality and a good deal of anguish." Joanne Latimer in her review "Beyond Blasphemy?" described Scott's subversive reinterpretation of the biblical Joseph as Josephine in The Dreamer Series where: "innocuous domestic scenes are, instead, clips of conspiracy in action." Art critic Lorne Falk wrote that her technique of imprimatura and glazing in the Blindman's Bluff Series: amplifies the process of constructing what she wants to say." In 2011, Montreal Gazette reviewer John Pohl noted her incorporation of nature within figuration: "puts Scott within the Canadian landscape tradition". Considered a pivotal Quebec artist, in La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960 anthologist Robert Bernier wrote: "Susan G. Scott has mastered the art of generating in action, a psychological pattern.... tensions, emotions, and thoughts which, with time, develop fully in the viewer’s mind." Bernier concluded that over the years: "Her language has become more complex, painterly and aesthetic. Scott shows an extraordinary capacity for reinventing herself while preserving the rigorous nature that marks her entire body of work."Scott was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2013.