Dan Scott– Artist Statement

In art there is a constant dialogue between the formal and the conceptual. What you see and what you come away knowing are often at odds with each other. There is an amazing tension between the subject-meaning represented and the form-meaning made present in the work. This tension is engaged in the phenomenological experience of the work unfolding before your eyes, becoming more than just subject plus its formal presentation.

I believe that this is what we as an audience should expect from art. I believe that I, as the artist, have a responsibility to bring that level of complexity to the work that I create. Most of all, I believe in the possibility that all of these things can happen. Visual art should be the expression of an aesthetic idea. An image that has integrity and logic can communicate that idea. This communication can be experienced as truth to the careful viewer. Truth is a beautiful thing.

There is a conscious quality of the subversive in my work. The paintings seek to lure the viewer into their space through their surface accessibility. They are constructed to evoke a sensual world of color, stillness, and light radiating into the dark. It is a world where constructed beauty is an element that mediates a dialogue on the nature of truth, or perhaps my truth. I make paintings where content is revealed slowly through a complex dialogue with form. This is a very demanding form of visual communication that expects a great deal of the viewer. I believe the best reward you can offer in payment for the generosity of one willing to enter this dialogue is an engagement with meaning.

We live in a time when profound communication has become marginalized. We are constantly bombarded with information and imagery and yet there is little room for meaningful exchanges. In today’s society, it seems to me that there is a conspiracy of superficiality that devalues the type of experience that it is possible to have with art. That experience may be simple, honest, meaningful, generous, perhaps even gracious, and still it will rarely find a home in contemporary culture. Today, it seems to me, it might be a profound act of dissent to stop for a while and look at a painting. To many it may seem transgressive in nature for an artist and the audience to have a conversation, which occurs over time, mediated by an object. But I believe that transgression is a good thing.

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