The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in the ability to produce miracles-Mark Rothko am on a journey with paint to celebrate individuality in the face of the machine. To breathe life into paint and paint into life. Geometry is the foundation on which I add the flesh of paint. The flow, the unravelling of colour, the merging. I usually prepare the background of my paintings with one colour and work onto this surface in a process-based technique of pouring, spilling, dripping and throwing, to create a relationship of shapes. I let the gloss paint drip, swirl and coagulate. I drip, I pour, I build layers to explore the materiality of paint. I often paint in families or groups which creates a strong link in the work lam doing. I am looking to explore the interaction of paint and mixed media on the canvas surface. The journey, the adventure, the act of creation. My major themes are geometry, colour, relationships, presence, absence and depth. I am looking to explore the relationship between abstraction and figuration and the space in between. In the concept of cosy – for me there is hope. Our existence is like an energy propelling us towards death. Within that statement already is the contradiction in the life we live. We are alive yet within us are the very seeds of our death. Dark and light is woven together within us. I celebrate the possibility of redemption through creativity and community. Abstract art like music goes to the soul, to the subconscious – art takes us on a journey within. Abstract art triggers memories and dreams as we create our reality with our imagination. What do you see? Creating intimacy. Connecting spheres. Forging new frontiers. People are dying within our corporate culture. Offering the flower of hope through art and looking oppression in the mouth. Art can be like a Trojan horse.
The flower always breaks through the concrete. Love never fails.
The chance to dance
The chance to create
Within us are the keys
Beauty in the intelligence of an atom
The hope in us
Reject the tyranny of beauty and celebrate individuality and community
We are all related
Let’s live the dream
Let’s make history
Let art connect us with nature within Written in blood
Marcia Scott, the endless desire, HoSA Publishing, 2017
Flow is the dominant dynamic of Marcia Scott’s recent paintings. Flow is what creates the shapes; and its cessation, its edges, its boundaries and its dissipations are what determine the interrelations between those shapes and the static colour fields within which they swirl, puddle, convolute and configure. These are not relations of figure and ground: an oil slick has no figure; the sea provides no ground. Household paint that flows down a virgin wall leaves us with nothing but the image of its own dynamic: it creates no image that Leonardo might magic into a fantastic battle scene or a forest or mountain range. Indeed one of the most remarkable things about Scott’s paintings is their resistance to any such figural or narrative reading: we have enough to wonder at in the play of flowing, merging, marbling colour shapes and in the sharp definitions, edge and limit, of arrested flux.
The imagination must find play enough in the actual, as when we contemplate tidal seawater spread and soak, divide into channels and endlessly re-connect over estuarine mudflats, or we consider the static writhing of the intertwining complexities of mango roots, or watch the changing shapes of towering clouds, water vapour so definite, so indefinite, so sharp edged where there exists no edge, against a perfect blue sky. Looking into a Scott painting I do not ask: what does this look like? I am delighted and surprised by the fact that it looks like itself. There is no metaphor in these paintings: they are what they are; they present directly, not represent indirectly.
If a dense flow is dominant, it is not the only dynamic in play in these grand paintings. In them, paint obeys its own impulses, performs according to its natural propensities: it runs in downward linear verticals (often turned on their sides, the vertical trickle turned in 45 degrees to horizontal, or 90 to flow upwards or descend like wires); it meanders, mixes, merges and swirls, it interlaces and loops; it is splotched and spattered. Always its deployment (Scott has become quickly a virtuoso in its handling) is determined by its intrinsic nature: these works belong in the line of process and matter painting. In such work its making is manifest and visible; the medium is self declarative. Its subject is, in part, the nature of the medium itself, its plasticity, its magical analogical properties, its objective beauty and ugliness. It surprises the eye; its correspondences bring delight to the mind. It speaks for itself.
Scale is crucial: the support is the area (or arena) of play, and the paint must have enough space to operate, to create its multifarious and dizzying effects, visual and optical, its organic forms whose curved and indeterminate boundaries are set in contrast to the geometric edges of canvas (or tarpaulin, or whatever). Close up, certain of these larger images, immersive and continuous, flood the field of vision; move away and they offer thrilling liquid topographies to the sight, the paradoxical pleasures of complex colour and fluid forms in the process of becoming, of movement-in-stasis, flow in stillness.
In Scott’s paintings there is no ground, abstract-imaginary or depicted, to stand on. There is no focal point. They induce in the viewer a sensation of vertiginousness as the eye enters a universe whose elements are air, light, colour, in which forms are conjured from insubstantial fluid, and in which the eye is always in motion. (This aspect reminds me at times of the impalpable, melting landscapes of Ernst, Dali and Tanguy, the viscous stuff of surrealist dreams.) And yet: these visions are compounded of a substance that has a robust and rudimentary tactility, that is, by its very nature, opaque. House paint stops the eye at its hard shiny surface. Paradoxically, out of the opacity of this surface gloss is conjured the sensation of the translucency of what has been called film colour, that colour which has no substance, which we look through as in our apprehension of the vivid blue or grey or sunset-purple aerial infinity of the sky, or which gives the sea its mutable greenness or blueness or greyness, or a petrol slick its ever-changing rainbow hues, or ice its impenetrable translucency. The eye’s imagination has excitements here: incitements to reverie.
Mel Gooding – February 2018
My esteemed friend, the poet and critic Mel Gooding, quotes Joseph Beuys: “Every human being is an artist”, in his publication ‘Art Rules! (And How to Break Them)’. Marcia Scott like her mother and grandmother before her, will agree with Mel from the evidence of their shared natural aptitude known as sketching. Long hours making, dwelling on the exercise of perfecting hand/eye co-ordination, enjoying the effect which in Britain continues to be the standard by which artistic talent is judged: I can testify to Marcia Scott’s quick sketches and recognisable portraits of family and friends.
This natural unwilled gift for her has never been enough. Over the many years I have known her this satisfaction has never shaken my belief that this to me, is about touch, immediacy and disinterested enjoyment of the look and making of things. With button gives the aesthetic pleasure of looking. But the pleasure is in the making over a sustained length of time.
In my weakened state five years ago, I asked to her deliver the stuff from the heavy palette. The penny dropped for her doing my bidding with the material, the actual pleasure of becoming involved with the stuff allowed her to get such satisfaction and excitement from all the different ways that she now uses this material. My confidence is in her fulfilment and I have gained sustenance from this collaboration.
If anyone can make art what’s the point of making it? The small number of stubborn dedicated practitioners, of whom Marcia Scott is one, and in contention to be among the best, seems to be growing and they find reason to go on trying to make sense of the sustained urgency of making. Mannerism can be lurking there in the making when learned dexterity becomes brittle and drained of creativity. The ingredient that provides the hook is the satisfaction born of the liveliness and mystery of what one has achieved. The haptic tap, tap, shuffle and pawing of the air as in the dance of a blind man, as a body in fear loses its balance. The feel from your feet to your head trying to negotiate space and hand and eye co-ordination of touch on the surface.
Frank Bowling OBE RA (Marcia Scott, the endless desire, HoSA Publishing, 2017)
Good art, it always seems to me, has to reflect with uncompromising honesty the personality and character traits of the artist. Marcia Scott is a prime example of an artist who does just that, projecting her optimism, warmth and generosity of spirit in her vibrant and life-affirming paintings.
Michael Sandle RA