Self-Portrait

Struggle at The Burial of Viejo de Saco

The Exhibitionist

The Fighter

Untitled

The Survivor and the imposter set sail at the burial of viejo de saco

The Underdog

The Immigrant

The Hypochondriac

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Scott Avett – Artist Statement

My paintings are all figurative. They are based on emotions and or mental moments in my life, moments leading to Self-Actualization through age, experience, and careful analyzing.

Much of my work is in the form of a portrait or self-portrait. Each portrait is used as an introduction of a new character. These characters symbolize different states or emotions within my life. This choice of subject matter is relatively new to me and is taking shape rapidly. The characters are being built for the stories to come, which will unfold with my life. Once characters like, “The Hypochondriac” or “The Exhibitionist” have been established they will be involved in events. These events will become the stories which will then become the art work. Many will be in the form of large scale multiple figure paintings. The first installment of this type of painting was, “The Underdog”, a painting loosely based on the story of David and Goliath but applied on a personal level. The most recent Narrative paintings are “The Survivor and The Imposter Set Sail at The Burial of Viejo de Saco” and “Struggle at The Burial of Viejo de Saco”.

Along with new ideas for subject matter I have grown interested in a more naturalistic approach in my paintings. The paint is thinner and the blending smoother. I still believe that it is necessary to take a different approach to process for each painting and I do just that, the slightest change in approach sometimes makes the most drastic difference in the outcome of the painting.

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

Tom Schulz – Letter From The Director

ACTUALIZATION WITH NO END: NARRATIVE AND PROCESS IN THE PAINTINGS OF SCOTT AVETT

"A landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories." – Kevin Lynch The Image of the City (1960)

I have a past. You have a past. Scott Avett has a past. How we operate from within our individual histories is as much about creating a personalized mythology as it is about memory or genetics.

You have a future. Scott Avett has a future. I have a future – especially on a good day. In the Modern World, we have held firm to the ‘fact’ that the narratives of our future have yet to be written. Have yet to be given voice. In paraphrasing physicist Stephen Hawking: we allow ourselves to remember the past; how is it that we do not allow ourselves to remember the future?

I have a present. And I am hoping that this present may act as more than some tenuous link to a past that (in retrospect) is as complex in its composition as the myriad of artifacts that comprise it. And I am hoping that this present (as I experience it) is more than a pause at some threshold where I might conjure forth some mysterious future. In my desires, then, I have come to understand that the enormity of this present is ever enlarged by the relationship of the current moment to both the past and the future.

As I see it, narrative becomes a point of beginning. The narrative is never isolated, for it never begins without an explicit or implied connection to other narratives. Any attempt to make a narrative the definitive narrative – complete within itself – may create a tale that ceases to be of interest even as it excludes the voices of other narratives.

And it may be conceit to assume that mythology is human contrivance. Take the Grand Canyon for instance. The nuances of its story allow me to know that there is no beginning I may intellectually understand. After all, the canyon existed in potential even as the river ran along the smooth alluvial plain. But I also trust that there is no comprehensible ending either. It is in this very lack of closure that I find comfort. It allows me the privilege of extrapolating. Of allowing some of my characters, my idiosyncrasies, to populate the space depicted.

In that spirit, I find an affinity with the Noble and Grand experiment that Scott Avett has undertaken in his new series of narrative paintings. As he describes his efforts, I come to consider that perhaps he himself is a human prairie, and that his artistic aspirations are the river washed through along the bleak interior carvings of bone and cartilage, experience and effort the silt deposited into the distant and salty sea. For a contemporary painter to assume the strategies of artistic “mastery” most often associated with the Great Renaissance Masters is to almost automatically leap into the treacherous arena of controversial discourse. You’ve got your striated hierarchies, your stringent evaluations of beauty. Your exclusionary practices. But without trying to easily dismiss one of the great cultural conflicts in Western art history, I say bring back critic Clement Greenberg, lock him in the cage with the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, and let them duke it out. For if technical skill were the only requirement to mastery, then perhaps I would recognize the names of Nerdrum’s students. And if ferocious and ironic audacity were the only access to content, then cable television would have co-opted the process for a reality show.

If Fine Art is to have a timeless authenticity, then I am thinking that any association with timelessness must require a narrative that is receptive to an individuals perceptive read. The narrative would need to admire the heft and weave of the blanket of all stories.

Is Avett’s current work up to the daunting task of bearing the weight of Western art’s history? No, but then what work can exist as the fulcrum to the calculation of that judgment? What the paintings are is intentful. The process of their conception and implementation considerate and studied. Is the narrative timeless?
I’m not sure yet. First, I’ll have to remember the future.

"When an eccentric accent is essential to a composition and its meaning, one must accept its eccentricity."
– Rudolf Arnheim The Power of the Center (1998)