The artwork of Scott Prior is guided by light, which allows viewers to pause and marvel at its fleeting elements.

The light in Scott Prior’s paintings is palpable as if it were a substance enveloping the scenes and objects, enveloping each in a different way while revealing different qualities about itself.

Prior paints the familiar: the windowsill over the kitchen sink, the backyard, models he has known for years. Nearly all are shown in a brief moment of early morning or afternoon light that is gone in an instant. The paintings “reveal the transitory nature of life,” he says. ”Whatever is happening is going to be gone. It showed up, I noticed it, presented it and it’s gone.”

His paintings of the kitchen windowsill allow us to pause in that moment—to look and to marvel at what is so fleeting. “Stuff collects over the sink,” he says, “plants, bottles, things I collect. It’s my life. I paint the things that are familiar to me. I can be most honest with these things. I don’t want to mess with people. I put down what is real, what I understand, what I know. There’s not really a message. Sometimes I invent. It’s real but it’s not literal. I move things around for color, balance, etc. It’s very compositionally balanced.”

In Window in Autumn, one of my favorite Scott Prior “things” is a red plastic Mr. Peanut that shows up when he needs a spot of red in a composition. Light bathes the tomato and the lemon, illuminating their roundness and causing the lemon’s yellow to be reflected in the red of the tomato’s skin. It shines through the sunflower petals and various bottles and causes the heliotropic flowers in a plastic cup to turn toward its source. The strong compositional triangle isn’t apparent at first, anchored by a yellow lemon on the lower right and a yellow mustard container on the lower left.

I tried to make a connection between Mr. Peanut and another Mr. Peanut who appeared in a biographical sketch he wrote. “When I was a child there was a small store that sold peanuts and candy with an enormous Mr. Peanut in the front parking lot,” and went on to describe its change over the years. In Rabbit at Rest, John Updike refers to its later manifestation as “a big sign saying DISCO remade from a Mr. Peanut in spats and top hat brandishing his stick in neon.” Sometimes, however, Mr. Peanut is just Mr. Peanut, and something red.

He also says, “laundry is laundry,” describing his paintings of beach towels