Richard T Scott

Biography

Scott was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1980 to a working-class family. He witnessed in first person the Heritage High School shooting on May 20, 1999, which profoundly influenced a later body of work. He later said of that experience that it had crystallized his perspective that his calling was to be an artist.

He pursued a BFA in painting in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he studied with Margaret Morrison and Joseph Norman, followed by an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, where he studied notably, with Vincent Desiderio, Steven Assael, and Edward Schmidt. After graduation he worked for two years as a painter for Jeff Koons, then three years as a studio assistant to Odd Nerdrum in Norway and Paris, France. Scott began work for the United States Mint in 2014.

Paintings

Scott is known for his emotionally charged and often unsettling classically influenced paintings, which hover on the border between realism, magical realism, romanticism, and often concern philosophical questions and alternative parallel narratives to biblical stories, myths, and literature. Combining skills and techniques from the Old Masters with philosophy - Post-contemporary or Reconstructivism, Scott's figurative work involves a synthesis of narrative and iconic symbolism and draws upon memories, dreams, and reality.

His second body of work, beginning in 2014, is much more political than his previous work, exploring the origins and development of systemic and social discrimination as well as gun violence in American Culture. The first major piece in the series "When the Man Comes Around" is in the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art. His largest work to date, "Hearts of Men" was unveiled at Paul Booth Gallery in New York City August of 2016.

"The works are fraught with allusions to Old Masterpieces, suggesting they are New Masterpieces. Adam Miller, David Molesky and Richard T. Scott are what I have called New Old Masters; that is, they use Old Master styles to mediate modern reality and to give emotional and cognitive depth to events that the mass media would treat superficially (one more momentarily hot news story, here today, gone tomorrow). " - Donald Kuspit

"I'm interested in ambiguity because it allows the viewer to enter the piece and bring their own subjective life experiences... For me a great painting must have both intellectual content and an emotional content, because that is what seduces the viewer into the work and makes the intellectual content available... I'm searching for a content that transcends my own personal experience, something that reaches for a more universal human experience, something that people can identify with in their own lives."

Other appearances

Scott has acted in several films directed by Odd Nerdrum as well as an extra in the 1999 film The Price of a Broken Heart. Scott appears as a character in Exodus, a memoir by NY Times best-selling author Deborah Feldman. He appeared in American Painting Video Magazine, in podcast via the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Center, and Radio France International. Also, from his own studio Scott gave a video interview named Artist Spotlight in which he discusses philosophical aspects of visual art modalities.

Political activism

Scott has made a stance against internet censorship, and as an advocate for internet freedom. In 2010, Scott told the New York Times that Facebook (contrary to their official policies) was censoring classical paintings of nudes, which had been deleted from the accounts of many painters as well as established institutions such as the New York Academy of Art. Facebook made an official apology, and altered their automated systems for dealing with complaints.

In 2011, Scott collaborated with other American realists such as Nelson Shanks, Daniel Graves, Alexey Steele, and American Artist Magazine to mount a defense for Odd Nerdrum during the 2011 tax evasion scandal. (Also see Odd Nerdrum for more information.)

Education

Reviews

"Whether it is in his portraits, his compositions, or either still in his interiors, Richard T. Scott always tries to produce, on his spectators, a certain effect of strangeness, or at least, something like a feeling of longing. That's why, maybe, his compositions are populated for the greater part with mirrors in which appear, not simply beings just like those who face us - but of real spectres having the function to destabilize our glance while giving the fourth dimension for us to see." - Frédéric Charles Baitinger.

"Richard T. Scott sees our epoch with the eyes of Rembrandt - an attitude nearly revolutionary on the scene of contemporary art." - Grégory Picard.

"Time and release of learned expectations gradually dissolve and what grows before our eyes is beauty. No lessons, no secondary statements, no parody or shaking of the fist against the angst of the world. Just beauty, asking us to experience it." - Grady Harp.

Exhibitions

Collections

The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Museu Europeu d'Art Modern , The Museum of Contemporary Art Sicily Palazzo Riso, former British Arts Minister Alan Howarth, Baron Howarth of Newport, Austrian Embassy in Oslo, Dr. Richard Epes, Prince Morad El Hattab, Robert C. Kennedy Ph.D.