RomanScottArt: 2012

Monday, December 31, 2012

Hoarding in progress

Hoard (in progress)

90x70 oil 2012

This one is closely related to Closets. The challenge is to not over-control it, allowing a surrealistic openness to shapes. The house is a container for hoarded objects. Are these objects only inanimate things, or are they memories--or beings and activities?

Hoarding or collecting is a kind of organization and stratification; the most wonton hoarder at least organizes through the layers (things on top of other things--strata.) The house rests on its basement, which merges with the earthy or geological stratum below.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Coast

Coast

90x70cm, oil on canvas, 2012

Southern Oregon Coast

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Cups in progress

Moon Cup

Height: 10cm

Craters upon craters. Think back to the asteroid that hit near Yucatan 65 million years ago. That whacked the climate out of shape for thousands of years after the initial days of the apocalypse, which saw temperatures rise to red hot, hotter than the glow within a pottery kiln. (Killed off the dinosaurs, giving us mammals a chance; little rodents lay in burrows, weathering the extreme oven on the surface.) This fateful crater cannot be seen today on Earth, but had it hit the moon it would still look fresh. Earth's atmosphere and geology erases traces of craters, but on the moon it seems the only thing that disturbs a given crater is another crater.

Sacsahuaman

Height: 10cm This is inspired by the terraced walls in Peru, whose style of jointing and pointing has caused such wonder and speculation. Sacsahuaman's cyclopian blocks, weighing tons each, were carved so as to fit together perfectly, joints paper-thin.

Brain Cup

Height: 12cm

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Closets

Closets

oil 55x50 2012

Memory and the way the mind organizes and associates experience is what inspired this.

Closets within closets. Are they fridges? Have some things been removed, or deteriorated beyond recognition?

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Brooklyn Bridge, Stone and Iron

80x60 oil 2012

The Brooklyn Bridge says much. It shows architectural tradition in its massive masonry and gothic arches. Unlike England's Houses of Parliament (built roughly in the same Gothic Revival era), the bridge is without filigreed refinement. The unadorned arches look more like functional flying buttresses. Instead of buttressing a cathedral, however, they stand fulcrum to hundreds of steel cables holding modern suspension bridge. They weld together stone and iron, old and new, completing a masterpiece of engineering.

There's much even in the very name The Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn: who has not lived there, at least for a time? The bridge made it possible for New York to later annex the borough, enriching the city's wealth of ideas and innovation. These innovations and visions have shaped the nation and the world.

The bridge is a unique icon, sui generis. It reflects the nation better than the classicism of the U.S. Capitol (elegant as it is), or the rote egyptomania of the Washington monument.

The Brooklyn Bridge would be very suitable for use on a new currency, should the U.S. ever be forced to redesign the look of its dollar. (Think of the way the Euro was forced to avoid a face of any one nation, in favor of nameless architectural details.)

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Flat Iron, Ever Thus

Flat Iron

40x30 oil 2012

(Seems every time I paint this intersection there is some kind of temporary blockage marring the scene, as when you find a cathedral's facade scaffolded for maintenance. Not so this summer; the building anchored the scene in "ever-thusness."

Thursday, August 9, 2012

In the Beginning

40x30 oil 2012

(My grandfather and his three older siblings c.1914, Montana.)

Ancestral photos are great inspirational sources, especially if they are like this one; it seems of the 19th century, before the convention of the grin, which often renders photos more difficult to use as sources of portraiture.