MICHAEL SCOTT
On the Trail
Michael Scott has lived on both ends of the Santa Fe Trail, the famous route that carried settlers into the Southwest from the Midwest during the 1800s. “I remember as a kid having this fantasy of the Santa Fe Trail, and now here I’ve lived at the beginning and the end of it,” he says. And beginning June 28, the New Mexico artist will be showing new landscapes that could easily be a travelogue from the trail, and also new ones he’s blazing.
His show, Preternatural at EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will feature 14 new paintings, many of them massive landscapes measuring as tall as 90 inches and as wide as 87 inches. They are works meant to be observed from across the room, but also up close as the scenery envelopes the senses and transports the viewer deep into Scott’s natural wonders.
“I’m connecting a thread within that 1800s romantic notion that would be of German painter Caspar David Friedrich. He and Thomas Cole and John Martin—he was out of England and was one of Cole’s teachers—these are the painters who interest me, primarily because they all operate in this otherworldly aspect of the landscape,” Scott
says. “The thread is at times religious, spiritual or sometimes environmental. I spend years on each painting, so I really focus on everything that goes into each one.”
Scott initially started painting works that focused on environmental aspects, including acid rain and deforestation. After about 15 years painting those subjects he turned to the figure, still lifes and more conceptual works that had storytelling elements. “About seven years ago, though, I had a life event and everything basically got very clear for me. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do, and I would eventually come full circle back to nature, particularly the great parks of the American West,” he says. “This conversation I’m having now through these works are very close to my core, and they deal with many of the environmental concerns we are faced with.”
In Olympia Rainforest, Lightshaft, for instance, Scott paints a dense forest scene in the Northwest with light that punctures the upper canopy in diagonal columns that illuminate the greens and reds on the forest floor. In Late Light, Grand Canyon, the artist offers an epic Thomas Moransized view of the Grand Canyon, but then conceals part of it with trees on the canyon rim—an audacious choice that punctuates his pursuit of the untamed wilderness in its rawest form. These are pristine slices of nature, untouched by man.
And even though he could punctuate these images with environmental messages, he lets the paint convey its own message. “I don’t brow beat the viewer for my discussion. I think a good work of art should be seductive and out of that seduction you enter into whatever instinct you might have toward it. Some are more obvious in terms of their conversation,” he says. “…I try to not paint the place as much as I’m trying to experience the place, but the experience is to be in that place.”
Scott’s new show will continue through July 20 in Santa Fe.
EVOKE Contemporary 550 S. Guadalupe Street • Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 995-9902 • www.evokecontemporary.com