Moving

My site has moved.

https://stephenscott.ca

Where Sunny Lived

Cyrenus (Sunny) Robichaud is my wife's uncle. A bachelor, he has lived in the small village of Inkerman on the Acadian peninsula all of his life. He has reached the point of having to leave his house, and it is left as it was when he was living there. The following are a few of the photographs I took recently. 

I was fascinated by the narratives which could be revealed in each image of a long and simple life.

L'Infant de Prague

When they were children.

Sackville School?

Site of the proposed future Guild Academy of Arts 

Over the summer I will be costing out renovations for conversion to a facility appropriate for  painting instruction, lectures and small exhibitions. 

This project is an idea generated by Virgil, Meredith and myself which would develop in an effort to provide instruction for painting technique and support of a somewhat classical aesthetic philosophy. This follows from our discussions over the last year while engaged in painting a portrait of Virgil, and which culminated in a series of blogposts and a pending book. Go to Beaverbrook Art Gallery for a review of this project, and philosophical background.

Sackville (The Play) Casting continued

The nature of the drama will unfold over the summer. Stay tuned...

 The Brigadeer

The Philosophist

 The Intruder

The Rationalists

 The Unsuspected

Sackville (Reprise)

As is my habit I am away from the sturm, dust and drang of the metropolis for the summer. I have returned to Sackville for a reprise of last summers adventures. 

The cast of this drama is the same. 

My mission is of course to use the landscape for inspiration, and the production of a group of landscapes for a public exhibition this fall. But the relaxing quality of life is a bit in contrast to the usual pull of the need to accomplish and be busy. It takes effort to relax, an oxymoron.

Here's a couple of initial sketches. I plan to develop some studio work as well, and perhaps draw from some of the motifs from last summer. Go to 

sackville sketches 2013

for some of those, and stay posted for the ongoing saga.

Portland Museum of Art

Virgil and I and Meridith made a trip to Portland with stops at Bodoin College and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. The mission had two objectives; one to initiate a relationship between the Portland Museum and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton NB- being that there are commonalities in terms of size, distance, and mission between the two galleries. The other was to begin forging an itinerary for a series of dialogues between Virgil and myself on a painting of our selection in the collection of a number of museums in the eastern US. The discussions are to be videotaped and distributed via the internet. The first and prototype of our talks has been completed at the Beaverbrook, on a painting by Graham Sutherland.

Another reason for the trip was that among the exhibited works which were currently on display was a major retrospective of the work of Richard Estes. Now, I am not a fan of photorealism and was prepared to be bored by gratuitous copy work, but I left with more positive feelings. Firstly, it reconfirmed my belief that digital or photographic images just do not provide enough information to carry the reality, message or weight of a visual artwork. One thing that had been missing for me, having never seen a work of Mr. Estes was surface, and scale (the works are mainly fairly large). Another perception was that the intricacy of the works bring the viewer to a heightened visual perceptive experience, and I feel (as I felt) that most would leave the exhibition with more visual awareness of the world than before. And as Virgil pointed out, the works are sometimes composite compositions based on the integration of more than one photographic reference, and so are creatively managed.

Docent Talk

An interesting day followed in which we spoke to the docents on the nature of the works in the exhibition. The range of topics covered the birth of creative inspiration to technical issues.

Stephen Paints a Picture

The exhibition opened Feb 27. It had an unusually fast turnaround from the original conception. The show had a "hook" in that it's origin lay in the combined project of Virgil Hammock's and mine which centred on a 20 part text of the conversation between us while working on a Virgil's portrait, and which was available as an ebook. As a result the exhibition contained working drawings and finished and unfinished paintings of the portrait, an exhibition of painting equipment and artifacts as well as the original note and sketchbook, and a good sized collection of recent figurative works. Further plans which will keep this alive as an ongoing project is the fact that the final picture will be completed in situ. We came to feel that this was a fairly original concept for a museum show in that it was not a static exhibition of pictures, focussed on the act of painting (art for arts sake) and would be of interest to a wider audience. 

Speech central

A view of the installation

Virgil and Meridith

James Wilson. Guildsman?

Family

Popup at the Beaverbrook

Virgil Hammock  is curating a show of my work at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton which is built around an unfinished portrait project we undertook over the past summer involving the development of an ebook of our conversations on art as well as the picture. Due to unplanned circumstances completion of the project had to be postponed, but the show is to be up for some time, and the plan is to complete the project in situ. It seemed a good idea to include some current figurative work as grounding, and guide for the finished portrait.

Installation shots below.

Virgil