Michael Scott The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) posited that the power of matter acts upon the imagination of the artist to create works that kindle the soul’s response to something true. The momentous movement of energy I encountered during my visit to Michael Scott’s studio was vivid and humbling, true as the elements. Scott’s otherworldly landscape paintings—which depict, seemingly by magic, the matter beneath the form—are chronicled in an exhibition and book that share the name Preternatural.
moments that captured his attention, portals to the form and matter of the places that stopped him in his tracks. While the form is captured in the shapes of rocks, geysers, clouds, and blazing forests, its matter, or substance, is comprised of nothing less than the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It is no coincidence that Preternatural takes heed of these elements. Scott’s relationship to the essence of the landscape informs every image he paints. His grand paintings, produced through years of studio work, are more than mere flights of fancy. They are more than precise depictions of beauty or of
frightening occurrences, more than plein air memories. As they transcend narrative, these paintings become condensed aspects of earth, water, air, and fire. Thomas Cole once said, “If imagination is shackled and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced within a painting or poetry.” Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, the first North American art movement to emerge from the Romantic period of art and literature Opposite: Michael Scott, The Witness, oil on canvas, 87” × 58”. Below: Michael Scott, Preternatural book cover.
“I am a wanderer,” says Scott. “Something happens out of meditative walking that encourages me to start a conversation with the landscape—though it’s not the landscape that stops me. It is something beyond the landscape. I don’t have a clue what is going on, but I want to participate in it. It is what you’re made of, what I’m made of, what the tree is made of.” Some call it life force, this undefinable thing that pumps the heart and vivifies matter. Anthropologists say that listening to the natural world is an animistic practice and that attributing sentience to the environment—indeed, to all things—is not only a worldview but a way of being. Perhaps it is sentience that calls out to Scott when he is immersed in nature. Regardless of its source, the call is acknowledged by the artist and recorded masterfully with hue, value, edges, and interlocking shapes. Scott’s plein air studies become memory maps of the
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