SCOTT LAWRENCE STUDIO

I MAKE STUFF . . . .

I have always been restless.  As a toddler, I pushed furniture across the room and knocked over lamps.  I was an early verbalizer and relentlessly curious. For example, when the little people talking inside the radio wanted to go home, how did they get out?

In high school one day we went on a field trip to see an exhibition of large abstract expressionist and color field paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. I was stunned with wonder. I was suspended in a new space of color, form and energy. I wanted to make such amazing things, myself.

From high school to graduate school, I worked my way up the stepping stones of higher education. After several years in academic life, including some teaching, I discovered that I was at my best when I was making things in a studio environment. I knew that I did not want to tangle up my art work with the pressures of earning a living, so I apprenticed myself to a furniture maker in Seattle and later opened my own custom shop and had a long career in fine woodworking. Here is some of my work.

All the while, I continued to create visual art. Having looked at countless paintings of all kinds in museums and galleries and printed reproductions, I came to appreciate such beauties as the intimacy of Bonnard’s eccentric color and brush work, or the sensation of impermanence in Turner’s swirling, liquid light, or the awkward immediacy and naked presence of a Morandi landscape. By looking and seeing, I tried to understand what made an affecting image. Slowly I developed my own ways to represent the ever changing play of light and form that makes our world. The art is in deciding which marks to keep and which to remove. Out of the dust cloud of trial and error, my own work emerged.

TALKING ABOUT VISUAL ART. . .

. . . can be a fool’s errand. An essential characteristic of visual art is SILENCE. Looking and seeing may inspire words, but word-shaped ideas and a painting’s raw presence are the difference between telling and showing. To ask what an abstract painting means is to make a category error. Ad Reinhardt put it this way:

So, keeping that in mind and proceeding with caution . . .

. . . WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

Everything changes. Nothing remains the same.

Everything is interdependent. Nothing stands alone.

Our life is shaped by our mind. We become what we think

Without love, there is nothing.

These are fundamental conditions and principles at work in the human universe, expressed in ancient philosophies and religions world wide. The rigors of modern science also manifest these ideas in the Standard Model and quantum physics. Theoretical physicist David Bohm visualized the implications of quantum mechanics to be all phenomena enfolded into a singularity called the implicate order. Out of this singularity unfolds the multiplicity of all things, the explicate order.

Lao Tzu called this enfolding and unfolding process between the implicate order and the explicate order, the Tao, the Way, the nature of the mutable world.

The paintings and prints I publish on this website are intended to evoke a sense of the creative, mercurial elusiveness of consciousness by drawing restless lines, painting unpredictable color and building textured surfaces. My purpose is to explore the affective power of complex visual relationships that signal impermanence and defy easy resolution into an unambiguous fixed image.

Sometimes I lay down an inchoate background of colors over which I draw a distinct network of raggedy white lines, delineating fragile shapes. Sometimes I marshal sturdy shapes of color over a contrasting ground, flocked by jittery white streaks of change. I try to show the unity of figure and ground while acknowledging the volatility of that relationship, as in the complex movements of nature, the cycles of creation and destruction, growth and decay, life and death.

In my art, as in all art, imagination bears the weight of truth.

These paintings and prints are a measure of my sensibility. I hope seeing them falls within a measure of your appreciation.