Must Reads:

Scott Avett – Artist Statement:

My figurative painting began as homage to the blue-collar worker. I attempted to treat normal working class citizens with a since of nobility and pride in the same way that Courbet had done in the past. As I thought of Courbet in regards to my subject matter it was a more painterly approach that I took in handling paint and surface. My approach was less naturalistic with thick layers of paint with little to no medium to vehicle my colors. Painters like, American painter, John Singer Sargent as well as the American contemporary painter, Wayne Thiebaud, influenced this approach. This is most evident in my early work like, "The Maid", 1999.

As I develop my figurative painting I am exploring more of an intimate subject matter in regards to the figure as an individual, instead of a social class. This is becoming more evident within my self-portraits and others in 2003. I have also shifted my handling of paint by painting thinner with less opaque color from a more neutral palette. All of these combined are adding to a more naturalistic composition inspired from my studying Rembrandt and Caravaggio. I have only recently begun to explore such an approach but am finding it be much more fulfilling.

The paintings in this show range from the fall of 1999 through the winter of 2004. My paintings are all oil. No two paintings have been done in the same process and there is no formula. I intend to continue to change and develop throughout my life as an artist and painter and believe that this is absolutely necessary to do so.

Link:
to Scott Avett's band, The Avett Bros.

Tom Schulz – Letter From The Director:

On Being Swept Away

The traveling and working man/woman know each other by sight and nickname from past experience of travel, work, and residence of locales. Life habits become character traits, which are the fingerprints of each Hobo encountered. There are many eccentricities of each Hobo that cause each one to be identified in the Hobos dress, name, way of living, and what friends he/she surrounds themselves with, or if they are loners.

From: The Texas Madman Grand Duke of Hobos.  (Email Texas Madman)
Date: Mon Dec 30, 2002, 12:15 PM

There are so many cars and so many car drivers in contemporary American culture, that it is easy to assume that all Americans own and operate an automobile. Procuring a license has become an adolescent rite of passage, signifying that tenuous journey into adult motivation. Point to point, we have extended our living rooms so that there is no longer a distinction between the origin of departure and our defined destination, or home and the exotic unknown. So we speed along and watch the landscape slide by. We pause at comfortable and convenient oasis’ as our needs require, and find solace in the fact that these cloned comforts will also await our arrival, so that no adjustment is required.

We assume.

We assume that the car is some unalienable birthright and that to be ‘carless’ speaks to some offense, some intrinsic lacking that has more to do with character than perhaps with economics. Then it is easy to disregard the hitchhiker. Safer to pass the broken down heap. The asphalt is smooth, the tires sing. And besides there is time to make, deadlines waiting. Family with dinner getting cold. Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Illicit loves and business appointments. Keep your eyes on the road. Your hand on the wheel. Your pedal to the metal. Look at all the traffic. America’s needs move by trucks. I’ll be damned if I’ll dim my lights.

Yet, out of the dust bowl tradition, even as the Joads headed for their familial Promised Land there arose a restless meandering that sticks (even still) in the craw of our sleeker, well-oiled manifolds. By rail, by thumb, by foot: hobo’s migrated to a secret calling of work, temporary opportunity and revised community. These restless men and women, scoured out of the mainstream, devised a system of transportation that was not dependent on ownership. And not necessarily based on the strategy of arriving, for there was often only myth in the destination. These were drifters. And their value as individuals became circumspect. In gaining the designation hobo, an entire history had to be stripped away. In this transgression there was loss, and loneliness.

In the paintings of Scott Avett, there is a sense of this wandering, of this loneliness. There is a sense in his portraits that these characters may be on the brink of losing it all. That any work would only be temporary.

Meticulously painted, and washed with what could be perceived to be a Mediterranean light, it would be simple to compare Avett’s work with Caravvagio. But this is not simple work, and while it is impossible to escape the whole history of painting (both when making and critiquing painting), there is a sense that the language of that same history is somehow inadequate to fully understand what is going on here. As the hobos did (and still very much do), Avett travels through various regions of art making and carries the gleaned stories and the songs from camp to camp. There is restlessness here. Not content to follow what has become the traditional path for painters (akin to the modern freeway – focus on the way to the exclusion of all exits). He takes side roads. And while this is not required knowledge for a proper reading of his paintings, it is necessary to a more complete understanding of his art.

Scott is a member of The Avett Brothers, a trio of musicians that work out of Concord, North Carolina. I have listened to recordings of their music, which could easily be labeled as bluegrass, as country. But as with his paintings, a simple determination of association becomes limiting. And this is where the linkage between his chosen art forms becomes more about how an individualized artistic voice may have to contain many dialects; nuances that only a hobo might be able to collect.

Scott Avett is an artistic hobo.

Once I realized that his music was couched more in the terms of the social and cultural upheavals of the American Depression and less and less about conventional and contemporary musical genres, then something unfolded – a map drawn with spit and coal on the back of a discarded napkin. This was all the information needed to grasp that if there was a connection with Avett’s work and another painter (and there is there always is) then it would be the painter Thomas Hart Benton. This is not about style, but about methods of motivation. Benton was a narrative painter, his distorted figures and landscapes accurate in the depiction of a uniquely American energy. As accurate as the written conjuring of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, B. Traven.

As I view these paintings, I gather the impression that there is a fine layer of dust settled on the arms and necks of the subjects. That there is a layer of grime on the canvas and the stretcher bars. And this is not the dust of an old master (however competent these paintings are). No, this is the grit that gets behind your eyelids when you have had too many nights by the side of the road. Squinted too long at the bleak horizon. This is a specific chronicling of a journey, raw and unkempt.

And it may require a blended vernacular of brush and guitar. Oil and notes. Scott Avett’s painting is not diminished by his efforts in being a musician. And it is also not just informed by the music. Scott Avett actually requires this multi-faceted voice to capture a subject that after all then, becomes as big as all of outdoors, and as long as the lonesome highway.

“...pencil scrawls in my notebook the scraps of recollection the broken halfphrases the effort to intersect word with word to dovetail clause with clause to rebuild out of mangled memories unshakably (Oh Pontius Pilate) the truth”

– John Dos Passos, "The Big Money" (1936)

Written by Tom Schulz on March 27, 2004