Michael Scott Preternatural

michael scott

preternatural

preternatural

michael scott

preternatural Essays by

Laura F. Fry MaLin Wilson-Powell Amy Scott with a foreword by Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce

Museum of New Mexico Press Santa Fe

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artist statement

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foreword

Where Science Meets Art Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce President and CEO, Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio

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michael scott and painters of the 19th-century american landscape Laura F. Fry Senior Curator and Curator of Art, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma

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the landscape never fails MaLin Wilson-Powell Independant Curator and Author

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on fire Amy Scott Executive Vice President, Research and Interpretation, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Arts, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California

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acknowledgments

OPPOSITE

light break half dome (field study)

2019, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Artist Statement

The landscape has always offered me an invitation to enter the realm of the preternatural—a world of stillness, reflection, and phenomena far removed from the mundane activities of daily life. While I engage in this conversation with nature, logic and reason are often suspended. Indeed, the cold facts of the physical world could not be more dissimilar to the pure sensations derived from our wild places. These elements are what I instinctively and explicitly seek as a painter, not to restrict the landscape to a simple imitation but to participate in a conversation with the unknown.

Michael Scott

OPPOSITE

trepidation & desire (field study)

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

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foreword

Where Science Meets Art Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce

President and CEO Cincinnati Museum Center Cincinnati, Ohio

(detail)

paradise lost

2016–2019, oil on linen, 57 x 76 in.

For painter Michael Scott, the landscape of America contains our greatest monuments, our own versions of the European cathedrals—nothing less than treasures that should be viewed as sources of spiritual nourishment and protected for future generations.

This point of view, which situates the landscape as a metaphor for spiritual orientation and political purpose, places the artist squarely within a long history in American art. Eighteenth-century painter Thomas Cole, known as the father of the Hudson River School, notably created paintings that portray the natural world and man’s relationship to it.

Cole’s paintings proved instrumental to an entire generation of artists, including Robert S. Duncanson, William Louis Sonntag, John Casper Wild, Henry Lovie, Godfrey Frankenstein, and James Pierce Barton. Fittingly, work by all of them can be found within the collection of the Cincinnati Museum Center.

The long and storied relationship between science and art is at the core of the Cincinnati Museum Center’s mission. Our collections, which encompass aspects of science, art, and history, offer an environment for visitors to delve deeply into their understandings of the natural world. Science creates nature; nature inspires art; and the interplay of these two elements results in magic, wonder, and learning. This process of learning drives endless discoveries—about the world, about ourselves, and about ways to improve both for future generations.

Over the years, the Cincinnati Museum Center has used art and teaching artists to help expand our visitors’ comprehension of these subjects. We believe that discussions on topics of climate change, habitat destruction, erosion, pollution, species conservation, natural adaptation, and much more can—and should—begin with art. It’s no accident that we take this approach; indeed, John James Audubon lays claim to being the very first employee of the institution in 1819, then known as the Western Museum.

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It was this connection between science and art that led Cincinnati Museum Center trustee (and Director Emeritus of the Taft Museum of Art) Phillip Long to propose a compelling idea. By placing Michael Scott’s landscapes alongside historic Cincinnati landscapes and our immersive Ice Age Gallery with its zoological and geologic specimens, could we complement and further facilitate our mission to ignite wonder and curiosity? That question led directly to this exhibition, Michael Scott: Preternatural.

An explicit pairing of artwork with natural history and science is not new for the museum. Scott’s exhibition comes on the heels of a 2020-2021exhibition that marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, The Art and Activism of Charley Harper.

By showcasing the works of hometown artists with worldwide reputations, we hope to provide entry points for reflection and discussion while igniting a curiosity about the power of water, fire, wind, and rock. How do these natural forces shape our ecosystems and impact life on the planet and, by extension, all of us?

Scott’s career has taken him from the glacial Boundary Waters of Lake Superior to the fires of the Bitterroot National Forest and from the mist of the Buffalo River to the painted rocks of the Grand Canyon. In capturing the power of nature and the magic of each of these locations, he expresses a reverence for the formation of our wild places and plea for their conservation.

We are grateful to illuminate scientific knowledge through the stunning work of Michael Scott—who, not incidentally, earned an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. The juxtaposition of his paintings with historic landscapes of Cincinnati invites visitors to immerse themselves in a visual feast and connect to their own senses of wonder and curiosity.

Please enjoy Scott’s aesthetic vision and technical mastery as you take the opportunity to use his artwork as a springboard for investigating, observing, and testing your own understanding of nature. Be sure to breathe deeply and absorb the sublime beauty of this portrayal of America’s wild places.

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OPPOSITE

messenger of bitterroot study

2018–2020, oil on linen, 13.4 x 20 in.

buffalo river diptych

2015–2019, oil on linen, 58 x 146 in.

Tia Collection

bitterroot overlook

2017–2020, oil on linen, 58 x 87 in.

Private collection

olympic light shaft

2017–2019, oil on linen, 57 x 86 in.

Private collection

interior light i (field study)

interior light 3 (field study)

interior light 2 (field study)

fallen timber rainforest (field study)

2019, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2019, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2019, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2017, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

old growth (field study)

two pines (field study)

boundary waters spirit lynx (field study)

2017, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2012, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2018, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

blowing leaves autumn

1993, oil on linen, 45 x 76 in.

Private collection

above and following spread (detail)

old growth forest

1989–1990, oil on linen, 76 x 91 in.

new growth after fire

clear cut

1993, oil on board, 12 x 11.25 in.

1988–1990, oil on linen, 72 x 91 in.

silence

dying giants

1992, oil on linen, 44 x 48 in.

Private collection

1989–1990, oil on linen, 66.5 x 70 in.

Collection of The Butler Institute of American Art Youngstown, Ohio

grand canyon approaching storm

rain storm south rim

(field study)

2013–2019, oil on linen, 60 x 48 in.

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

saguaro cactus dance

saguaro cactus dance 2

following spread

2015–2018, oil on linen, 88 x 58 in.

Tia Collection

2019–2021, oil on linen, 88 x 58 in.

firebird

2019–2021, oil on linen, 58 x 107 in.

Private collection

michael scott and painters of the 19th-century american landscape laura f. fry Senior Curator and Curator of Art Gilcrease Museum Tulsa, Oklahoma

(detail)

fire tornado redwoods

2015–2019, oil on linen, 99 x 58 in.

An explosive year marked the beginning of this new decade. In recent months, news headlines have chronicled a planet engulfed in flames, both literal and metaphorical. From a global pandemic to a wave of civil rights protests and from violent conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire to an increase in frequency and intensity of actual forest fires, our world has rarely before seemed such a tinderbox. An elemental force of nature, fire contains immense power to both create and destroy.

But fire also heals. From the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Tallgrass Prairie in Oklahoma, naturally occurring fires are part of a healthy ecosystem. In fact, suppressing regular burns has led to catastrophic consequences in the United States.

Over the past century, Smokey the Bear’s misguided forest fire prevention efforts have left America’s western forests full of excess fuel, leading to today’s firestorms that rage beyond control. For all our power and hubris, humanity cannot fully dominate the forces of nature.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, artists in Europe and the United States have recognized the tangible consequences of disconnecting from nature in an increasingly mechanized society. In the early 19th century, Thomas Cole and Thomas Moran were both born in Bolton, Lancashire, a small English city ravaged by rapid industrial growth. After spending their formative years cloaked in smoky, rancid air from factory furnaces and woefully inadequate sanitation, both young men took solace in America’s forests and fields.

As they became leading artists in America’s Hudson River School of landscape painting in the East and the West, Cole and Moran did not intend to merely create pretty pictures of pleasing vistas. They aimed to disrupt ingrained patterns of thinking among Americans, countering the dehumanizing effects of industrialization by revealing the inherent value, power, and beauty of American lands. Their paintings

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rise to fame eight years later was inextricably linked to the founding of Yellowstone National Park. Moran accompanied the Ferdinand Hayden expedition to the Yellowstone region in 1871, and afterwards his watercolor sketches of Yellowstone’s hot springs, waterfalls, and canyons critically influenced Congress’s decision to preserve the region. Building on the previous public interest in Yosemite, Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872.

Thomas Moran Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1900 oil on canvas, 75.3 x 148.2 in.

Gilcrease Museum of Art Tulsa, Oklahoma

captivated the public, inspiring Americans to begin to value the land itself without regard for extractable market resources.

Through their paintings of the American landscape, Thomas Moran and his fellow painter (and sometimes rival) Albert Bierstadt were both linked to the establishment of national parks in the United States. In 1863, Bierstadt first visited the Yosemite Valley, in California, writing to John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, that he was “here in the garden of Eden I call it, the most magnificent place I was ever in.”1 At the height of his national fame, Bierstadt prominently exhibited his painting Valley of the Yosemite in New York in April 1864, only weeks before the passage of the Yosemite Grant Act in June 1864. In addition to the images of photographer Carlton Watkins, which were instrumental in convincing Congress to make Yosemite a state park, Bierstadt’s radiant paintings of the Yosemite Valley helped raise awareness of the region. Thomas Moran’s

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While Bierstadt and Moran both illustrate the power of the arts to inspire the public’s imagination and promote the preservation of American lands, their images of wideopen, endless, uninhabited lands also perpetuated a mirage. Their paintings often minimized or eliminated the indigenous peoples who had cultivated American lands for millennia, while also concealing the effects of rapidly increasing industrialization in the West. Thomas Moran’s grand-scale painting Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, in particular, reveals the limits of an artist’s ability to preserve the landscape in the face of relentless “progress” and capitalist growth.

Moran was awestruck by his first visit to Shoshone Falls in southern Idaho.

Nicknamed the “Niagara of the West,” the thundering cascade measured 212 feet high and more than 900 feet wide. In 1900, the secretary of the interior recommended Shoshone Falls for national park status to protect the magnificent site from industrial development. Moran supported the cause and began work on this painting immediately

Albert Bierstadt Valley of the Yosemite, 1864 Oil on paperboard 19.24 x 11.9 in.

Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Boston, Massachusetts

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following his visit to the falls. But Congress failed to act on the Shoshone Falls National Park proposal, and soon a hydroelectric dam was installed upstream. In 1905, the Snake River was diverted for irrigation, and the falls ran dry. Today, the glory of Shoshone Falls can only be seen in late spring, as melting snows increase the water flow. Moran’s painting became a testament to a landscape lost to reckless human actions.

Like the 19th-century artists who inspire his work, painter Michael Scott creates powerful images of the American landscape that speak to human relationships with the natural world. His large-scale works address elemental forces of nature: fire, ice, and water. In paintings of Yellowstone’s thermal features and the glaciers of Mt. Rainier, Scott includes red-stained skies and surreal ghostly animals, infusing America’s national parks with a sense of science fiction and fantasy. One critic noted that Scott’s landscapes are “like Thomas Cole meets Game of Thrones.”2 Beyond the physical presence of smoke and mist, Scott’s paintings reveal hints of unknowable supernatural forces in the American landscape.

Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Michael Scott has been a lifelong resident of the Midwest and Southwest. He currently lives and works in New Mexico—a place that has inspired several generations of landscape artists, including Ernest Blumenschein, Alexandre Hogue, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Over the course of his career, his work has frequently referenced influential figures from European and American art history, including Rembrandt van Rijn, J. M. W. Turner, Henry Farny, and Thomas Moran.

Scott’s previous painting series have include detailed still lifes and narrative works inspired by Buffalo Bill Cody, Western dime novels, and Dutch floral paintings. His most recent work, however, has focused on the American landscape, with only implied human presence. These large-scale landscape paintings are part of Scott’s ongoing series Preternatural, the title of which refers to what is beyond normal or natural, existing outside of nature.

While many of Thomas Moran’s and Albert Bierstadt’s western landscapes seem to portray a primeval, unchanging wilderness, Scott’s paintings show the constantly shifting, ambiguous state of nature. Small fires imply a human presence. Are these campfires, bringing comfort on a cold night, or the small sparks that will grow to bring down an entire forest? Some paintings reveal both the dangerous destruction and the beautiful radiance of a woodland blaze, while others show a fire’s aftermath, with torched, skeletal snags looming over newly verdant meadows, fed by nutrients supplied by a recent burn. Scott’s Preternatural series also shows the effects of water and ice on the land in the hollowed cliffs along Arkansas’s Buffalo River and the interplay between winter snowdrifts and steaming geysers in Yellowstone National Park.

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opposite

old faithful night

2014–2018, oil on linen, 88 x 58 in.

By portraying constantly shifting environments, Scott invites viewers to consider humanity’s responsibility for our rapidly changing climate. On viewing Scott’s paintings, one wonders how America’s lands will continue to change in the face of hotter fires, colder winters, and higher floods. With his contemporary homage to famous landscapes in the United States, Scott explores the surreal power and fragile beauty of the land and encourages respect for the unknowable, elemental forces of nature.

Notes 1. Bierstadt to John Hay, August 22, 1863, John Hay Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Quoted in Peter Hassrick, ed., Albert Bierstadt, Witness to a Changing West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 60.

2. Shana Nys Dambrot, “Michael Scott,” Artillery, November 6, 2018. Accessed March 2021, https://artillerymag.com/michael-scott

above and following spread (detail)

shied rock kawishiwi falls 46

2018–2021, oil on linen, 58 x 87 in.

interior pool (field study)

boundary waters falls 2 (field study)

boundary waters storm (field study)

study broken canoe (field study)

2018, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2019, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2019, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

2019, oil on paper, 6 x 10 in.

white water and broken canoe

2018–2021, oil on linen, 45 x 102 in.

rising mist buffalo river

2015–2019, oil on linen, 57 x 73 in.

river styx beaver plateau

1988, oil on linen, 50 x 52 in.

Private collection

1989–1990, oil on linen, 72.5 x 90 in.

Private collection

cattail family

rogue wave

1996, oil on linen, 69.5 x 49.5 in.

Gift of Dr. James and Mrs. Lois Sanitato Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

2015–21, oil on linen, 96 x 108 in.

moving storm— sunrise everglades

1990, oil on linen, 50 x 74 in.

Private collection

ice blocks washed ashore (field study)

valley tower falls (field study)

fog oregon coast (field study)

la push 2 (field study)

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2018, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2018, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

yellowstone falls dusk (field study)

firehole river (field study)

crested pool (field study)

yellowstone falls (field study)

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

moonlight yellowstone falls

2014–2018, oil on linen, 78 x 52 in.

Frozen Geyser Yellowstone

2014–2020, oil on linen, 78 x 52 in.

beaver lodge

1993, oil on linen, 46 x 72 in.

Private collection

The last thing you want to do is make a landscape singular.1 —Michael Scott

the landscape never fails MaLin wilson-powell Independent Curator and Author

opposite

thermal geyser 2

2014, oil on linen, 5 x 5 in.

In 2017 the curator of a large museum contacted Michael Scott about acquiring his panoramic Buffalo River Diptych (see pages 14-15). When he asked the artist to identify the exact location of the sheltering cliffs and the river’s bend in northern Arkansas, Scott said it wasn’t a literal place. With that, the deal was off. This turn of events made no sense to the artist and raises the question of what, exactly, the museum was interested in purchasing: a work of art replete with mystery or a topographical document with latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates? Although Scott’s large landscapes are filled with well-known landmarks and the feel of specific places, they are, on their journey to become finished paintings, infused with dreams and improvisational transformations. In his cathedral-like studio on the outskirts of Santa Fe, the artist works simultaneously on a number of large canvasses over a period of multiple years. First he draws with oil paint using a brush, then re-draws using rags.

He often radically alters the imagery and its major structural components, drawing them anew, then redrawing—and then, perhaps, yet again drawing and redrawing. His lengthy process is in service to bringing life to the overall surface of each painting, to make a living thing.

Scott’s first landscape paintings were made during a 1975 residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine. Through Skowhegan he came to admire the work of Rackstraw Downes and Neil Welliver. For many years Scott and his family returned to nearby Monhegan Island for the summer, and Maine itself has been his longest-lasting landscape subject. The artist’s next extended engagement with landscape occurred during the 1980s, when he was exhibiting in New York (no doubt

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as a means of compensation for the city’s all-encompassing concrete). These were large canvasses featuring forests devastated by acid rain and slash-and-burn clearing: “I saw the fragility, especially the black spruce on the northern shore of Lake Superior.” No one wanted these reminders of ecological destruction. At the time, Scott was familiar with Downes’s unembellished industrial landscapes, and he was also aware of the work of Neil Jenney, another artist whose landscapes were distinctive for not being prettified or romantic (see above).

After a gap of almost three decades, Scott returned in 2011 to landscape painting as his primary focus. This single-mindedness followed a health crisis involving major heart surgery, and it turned out that landscape painting was, quite literally, his heart’s consolation and replenishment. Not only did painting landscapes bring Scott happiness, he “wanted to make paintings that were more confrontational, in a size more suitable to museums than homes and obviously more difficult to sell. It was now or never.” Once a year, during the off-season, Scott makes lengthy visits to America’s national parks, where he paints small field studies. Back in the studio he realizes intermediary compositions on large canvasses that eventually—over weeks, months, and years—resolve themselves. Both the intermediary exercises and the finished grand landscapes meld imaginary dreams with remembered particulars of a physical place.

The large theatrical paintings are complex perceptual engines that offer such seductions as contrasting and complementary saturated color, the discernment of edges, recurring patterns, abstract mark-making, calligraphic line, the glow of moonlight, and the dematerialization of mist, smoke, and steam.

Scott was formally trained during the 1970s at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he graduated with a BFA, and the University of Cincinnati, where he received an MFA. With regard to landscape painting, the artist remembers copying Corot canvasses in the galleries of Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: “They were a first love that taught me the nuances of gray pigments in achieving light.” From 1998 through 2012, Scott’s landscapes predominately served as backgrounds, with the exception

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of a series of small boxes that emphasized landscape as seen through a window (see below). During this time, the artist investigated and played with the European genres of painting as they were ranked historically, from what was considered the most valued category to the least. Up until the modernist experiments of the late 19th century, multi-figure history paintings with allusions to antiquity represented the pinnacle of Western painting. On the rung beneath those historical paintings were flattering portraits of important people; next came paintings of those subjects’ thoroughbred horses and dogs; after that, landscapes (often their real estate); and, finally, still lifes of their prized possessions.

Beginning in 1999 Scott exhibited elaborate narratives that push, pull, and twist this hierarchy of genres. As both homage and satire, he developed five series of wild fairy tales: “Penny’s Grand Vision,” “The Diaries of the Little Red Hen,” “Farny’s Fables,” “Buffalo Bulb’s Wild West Show,” and “The Doggie Diaries.” These complicated

rackstraw downes Canal Homes at Bayou Vista, 1993 Oil on canvas, 11.4 in. x 10.5 feet Gift of Lily Auchincloss Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

ghost wolf

1996, oil on panel/oil on linen, 26 x 65 in.

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allegorical sequences reinterpret art originally made with European eyes using his own American ones. They both send up and seriously speculate upon the late-20th-century “painting is dead” dilemma. Consider, for example, a meticulously rendered history painting featuring the transvestite pullet Penny the peacock surrounded by a bevy of backyard fowl, or—in the style of heroic portraiture—a portrayal of 19th-century Western artist Henry Farny elaborately costumed in Rembrandt-era robes with a fly on his nose (see opposite page). At once engaging and ridiculous, they were both painted during the height of Postmodernism, when art was more concerned with critical theory than handcrafted object. Scott’s picaresque series combine conceptualism and realism, while offering a critique of and a tribute to the five-century lineage of oil painting.

During this time, the vast New Mexico desert as seen from Scott’s studio served as backdrop to his storytelling. (When he became serious about landscape painting again, he eschewed unimpeded distances and sought out views with verticals that halt the eye in the middle ground.)

Scott’s fables bring to mind two concerns in the art world during the 1990s. At a 1998 Chinati Foundation symposium, Light and Space artist Robert Irwin asserted that Postmodernism was “premature, wishful thinking” and that modernism had another 200 years, at least, of contributions to make to the visual arts. Another pertinent observation came from critic Dave Hickey, who is most widely known for his 1993 collection The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. Hickey heralded a much-needed return of beauty in art and characterized Postmodernism as a moment when artists didn’t need studios and instead went shopping to assemble their artworks. Scott, of course, is highly skilled, and in the one-of-a-kind oil paintings he makes in his studio, beauty is a primary concern. He credits this faith and belief in beauty directly to the enduring legacy of his mother, Robbie Scott. The “subtle poetry” of her garden graced his childhood home, which she adorned with bouquets, as had her mother before her.

fortune teller

2002, oil on linen, 57 x 67 in.

Private collection

small, medium, and large The prevailing premise of Scott’s work has always been the union of style and content, what he calls the “juice of life.”2 His particulars of format, proportion, scale, composition, palette, and facture (tactile quality) reveal much about his craft and his concepts. How does the artist move from small-format field studies to intermediary compositions that culminate in panoramic landscapes? What is built into each format?

How do they connect? two bit von tender

2006, oil on panel, 54 x 42 in.

Private collection 74

Small: Field Paintings Scott characterizes his field studies as “note-taking.” They are painted on clay-coated stock paper mounted on panels. The majority are 10-by-8-inch verticals, which is traditionally a portrait format. Occasionally, these quick plein air studies are horizontal, or landscape-format. While it is a truism that every painting is a self-portrait, Scott’s paintings made on-site are fluid iterations of the weather and of a moment, both external and internal. Most retain this mutable state—half liquid flashing strokes, half solid little objects. The field paintings also feel intimate, extending the American lineage of Fairfield Porter’s domestic New England “plainsong” sensibilities along with the magical charge of both Albert Pinkham Ryder and Charles Burchfield. Porter, who was a painter and a critic, worked in opposition to his zeitgeist, which had declared that representational painting was no longer relevant. His goal was to be direct and clearsighted, and of his paintings of everyday life he said, “They are a way of making a connection between yourself and everything.”3 Like Porter’s paintings, Scott’s small pieces, with their freshness and immediacy, are apt mirrors of elemental forces outside the individual: the fluctuation of temperature and humidity, the movement of air and water. The ecological implication is perceptual equality—the notion that humans are embedded in life, part of nature, and not superior to it. These potent little paintings speak to serendipity and the wandering eye of a wandering painter. The field studies are a record of being caught by a moment and the five-minute-plus flurry of putting paint on a surface while the wind blows, the black flies bite, or rain approaches.

Medium: Intermediary Paintings Although utterly divergent in tone, facture, and feeling, Scott’s field studies and subsequent large landscapes have been extensively exhibited. In contrast, his intermediary paintings, the step-in-between paintings, have never been exhibited and are sequestered in his studio. Scott calls them “tweaking panels.” They are painted on prepared panels of roughly the same dimensions (13 by 20 inches when horizontal).

These paintings serve as compositional tools, more blueprint and middle passage than arrival. Much more detailed and complex than the field studies, they coalesce intuitive hierarchies and advance Scott’s determinations toward building the variations of palette, proportion, and format for his large canvasses.

It is noteworthy that although the intermediary paintings are of standard proportion, they clarify Scott’s intentions in establishing the precise dimensions and scale of his large landscapes. They provide a precipice for his “leap of faith” into the unknown, into the lengthy back-and-forth dance with his larger canvasses. fire and water

2019, oil on linen, 19.75 x 24 in.

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This intermediary stage is suffused with the stuff of dreams and the play of the imagination. Scott found confirmation for his aesthetic boldness in the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, particularly his Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, first translated into English in 1988. Bachelard’s introduction reinforces Scott’s explicit intention to create both singular and universal paintings: “We could say that a stable and completely realized image clips the wings of the imagination.”4 Air and Dreams is one of Bachelard’s volumes of prose poetry about the soaring leap of imaginative fancy rooted in the four fundamental elements of earth, air, fire, and water—an orientation to the natural world that matches Scott’s own.5

Large Landscapes To reinforce his intentions, Scott’s big paintings vary dramatically in proportion— whether the piece in question is an extremely elongated landscape, a vertical image of an erupting geyser or tower of flame, or an almost square seascape. They are trimmed canvas panels, never larger than he can move by himself. He trusts that, by immersing himself in the arena of the canvas he can allow something unknown to emerge for both himself and his viewer—how one thing can swallow up a very different thing, how it can be inverted and transformed into something no longer controllable, into beauty, new life, new form. Fundamentally, the pieces are instruments of metamorphosis: “You listen to what the painting wants to be and needs to be.”6 Inevitably, all ambitious American landscape paintings are tethered to the majestic paintings of Hudson River artist Thomas Cole and his student Albert Bierstadt, who made grand landscapes of the American West, whether constructing a mythological Garden of Eden or representing Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845 to describe the idea that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion westward. Despite the obvious inherent bias in such romanticized images, Cole’s and Bierstadt’s paintings are still beloved and visited in our museums. Even more popular are the national parks they helped to establish. Hudson River painter Thomas Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was critical to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which in 1872 became the first of our now sixty-two national parks.

Virtually all of these parks astound with their magnificent beauty and abundant wildlife, and they are the inspiration for Scott’s 21st-century landscape paintings.

The sheer size of Scott’s large landscapes encompass us in their embrace. While the small field studies orient the viewer to the physical object, the large landscapes reorient the viewer to the field within the painting itself, entangling us in their compositions and grounding us in the abstract language of paint. They encourage

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opposite

geyser mist

2014, oil on linen, 78 x 52 in.

the viewer’s movement, which mirrors the dance the artist undertakes in making them. Scott considers the format of each painting “laden with meaning.” Horizontals encourage eyes to move from side to side, and seen up close his horizontal canvasses seem to encircle the viewer, filling the peripheral vision. Verticals encourage eyes to move up and down, and in Scott’s vertical paintings there is always a solid foreground, an implicit shelf that provides firm ground underfoot. Paintings of towering saguaro cactus, columns of fire, or geysers of water enliven a viewer’s spinal column and encourage mobile exploration. Square paintings—utilizing the format Scott considers “the biggest compositional challenge”—encourage the human eye to move around in a circle. Scott exploits this tendency in his square compositions featuring roiling water or deep forests punctuated by the calligraphy of canted vegetation.

Picture-making is filled with conventions, and Scott’s landscapes run the risk of being dismissed as direct descendants of 19th-century romanticism. This is largely a case of mistaken identity; they owe more to the 1970s interest in the phenomenology of perception, which was played out most predominately by Minimalists, and in landscape painting almost entirely by Downes. Perception is not a simple matter. A Richard Serra sculpture or a canvas by Downes is a participatory activity for both artist and viewer, an exercise of complex perspective. These works prompt the viewer to assume multiple vantage points for different durations. Each viewer constructs an experience in bits and pieces. For an artist with Scott’s intentions, the problem is not only the overwhelming association with historical, mythologized landscapes but with the dominance of our photographic way of seeing. Camera lenses focus a single eye on a single moment. When an image is captured by a camera, depth information is lost as objects in real-world, three-dimensional space are mapped onto a two-dimensional plane. Think of a photograph as a flattened, still image made by a cyclops. The classic rules of geometrical linear perspective introduced in the Renaissance were a way to freeze an image for contemplation by a congregation of immobile observers, most often seated or kneeling (and frequently illiterate). Today’s digital practices are based on these presumptions. Humans have two kinetic eyes in a head attached to a body that moves. Scott puts a demand on his viewer, echoing the demands he puts upon himself. He builds images from the memories of moving about a place, and he builds his paint surfaces—considering every inch and every jot of paint—by moving about the picture plane. Similar to an encounter with a Minimalist installation, this promotes in viewers a hyper-consciousness of their own physicality, and it is consistent with the discoveries of a burgeoning branch of science called ecological psychology. This field of research anchors visual perception in the body’s movement through the world, an understanding of perspective that has largely remained outside the purview of artistic painting practice.7

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While Scott uses his small paintings as a “library of information” when he embarks on his large canvasses, he has found that establishing the appropriate scale presents his biggest compositional challenge—and, consequently, his biggest potential for failure. Scott wrestles with two aspects of scale: first, the relationship between the size of something in the painting and its size in the real world and, second, the relationship of objects depicted within the proportions of the canvas itself. Scale, proportion, and the dimensions of a work of art often establish the optimum distance for viewing, whether a miniature painting, an object that reels in a viewer within a hair’s breadth of the surface, or a larger-than-life piece that, like those by Franz Kline, pushes a viewer to back up farther and farther.

For his large landscapes created in the 2010s through the 2020s, Scott not only found just the right ratio of scale to size, he also refined several strategies to seduce and engage a viewer. As already mentioned, he fully develops the middle ground; the reason he doesn’t paint the long New Mexico view as seen from his studio is that there are no stands of trees to enmesh the viewer. Among other strategies he deploys is a central, human-scale “X,” or hour-glass configuration, that mimics viewers’ bodies and, like a magnet, subliminally attracts them to the picture plane. Add to this the dynamism of the artist’s characteristic mark, his palette, and the visceral field he generates. During the 1980s, Scott found that the facture of paintings by German artists Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter struck him as “magical.” An artist’s stroke is as individual as handwriting, and Scott’s stroke or mark is a like a squiggly inverted number five or a backward “S” that quickens the eye when seen up close. From a distance, this tessellation of the surface—similar to pointillist dots—blends in the viewer’s eye. This encourages the shifting of eyes back and forth from a direct focal point of view to a diffuse and inclusive peripheral point of view.

Scott’s palette is another invigorating element of his landscapes. He strives to convey the “luminosity and vibration of light and the spatial tension between glazed and opaque color.” It is a palette that often hearkens back to the saturated hues and intensity of Maxfield Parrish, an artist known for his cobalt-blue skies and the primary colors he varnished between each application. Scott calls Parrish a “huge force, especially in the luminosity of his early landscapes . . . Nobody knew light and the physics of light as well as Parrish. It is why I glaze.” Both Scott and Parrish frequently depict landscapes at daybreak or dusk—also called the magic hour and sometimes the golden hour—when the sun is near the horizon and everything glows. Called the Purkinjě effect, after the 19thcentury Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkinjě, it is that psychedelic moment when both the rods and cones of the human eye are shifting to receive peak luminance.

To a viewer standing back from a Scott canvas, visual activation results from the artist’s depiction of a plethora of interacting elements—the dense foliage in a forest, beams of light and licks of flame, shimmering and dappling. Confident

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brushstrokes, forceful action, and overall energy are also characteristics of the work of two predecessors whom Scott admires and has studied carefully. In the European Romantic tradition (which is now 250 years old), he prizes the over-the-top dramatic compositions of 18th-century Romantic English painter John “Mad” Martin, and in the early American modernist lineage, Scott esteems the Maine seascapes of George Bellows, whose creamy brush strokes coalesce into a feeling of all-embracing vitality.

Metanarratives In a 1985 painting titled The Wanderer, (see opposite page, top) Scott paints himself in the style of the great German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, another of his heroes.

This self-portrait has never been exhibited and depicts the artist standing on the rocks of the Monhegan coastline facing a turbulent sea in the moonlight. Scott is recurrently drawn to depicting scenes bathed in lunar light, a legacy of Friedrich and such famous painters as J. M. W. Turner, Winslow Homer, Vincent van Gogh, and almost all of the surrealists. The foreground figure in Friedrich’s masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea Fog (1818) (see opposite page, bottom) embodies the idea (as do so many of his works) of the sublime, as the artist contemplates the terrifying forces of nature and the insignificance of the individual in the face of the “Great Void” (at the time, a reference to God). In 2018 Scott titled an exhibition of his large landscapes Preternatural, a word that is defined as that which lies beyond what is normal or natural.

Scott’s recent emphasis on the animating elements of fire and water speak to cycles of destruction and regeneration. When he was painting his skeleton forests in the 1980s, scientists were popularizing the notion that a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene had commenced and that humans had a significant impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including climate change. In a 2020 studio visit (available online), Scott spoke about the iconography in his 2017–2020 painting Messenger of the Bitterroot: “The glowing sun represents global warming, and the snowy owl is a phoenix rising out of the ashes of the last fifty years.”8 For Scott, the transparent images of wildlife that occasionally appear in his landscapes are Jungian messengers that ask us to pay attention to the four-billion-year-old beautiful planet that will thrive and revive without humans, a planet with a “never-ending abundance for recovery.” Scott’s paintings offer a place where the natural world, the human world, and the world of the spirit or the soul can commingle. Together they comprise an arena that oscillates between what is there and what is not there, what the artists brings to it and what the viewer brings to it.

Hanging in the artist’s home is a small canvas from 1996 of a deer rowing a teensy wooden boat adrift in a sea of strokes. Originally painted on Monhegan Island for Scott’s sons, who were then ten and twelve years old, the image depicts a whimsical

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the wanderer in acadia

1994, oil on panel, 12 x 18 in.

Private collection

casper david friedrich Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1817 Oil on canvas, 37.3 x 29.4 in.

Hamburger Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany

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escape by a single deer from hunters hired to kill every one of them because of Lyme disease. The painting is now a family talisman that can also be seen as a metaphorical self-portrait by the artist, who relies on his painterly skills to keep him afloat. It is a tumultuous journey of imagination with unknown consequences, a journey Scott has learned to trust through the decades. It is a revivifying process of making and seeing and remaking: “Nature feeds us in miraculous ways.”

Notes 1. All quotes, unless noted otherwise, are from the author’s conversations with Michael Scott, July through October, 2020.

2. Quoted in David T. Johnson, “Seeking Truth Inside the Father’s Eye,” The Diaries of the Little Red Hen, (Santa Fe: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2002), unpaginated. Exhibition catalog.

3. Quoted in John T. Spike, Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 9-10.

4. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1988), 2.

5. Air and Dreams (1943) is one of Bachelard’s four studies on literary imagination as determined by four fundamental elements. The other three are The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and Dreams (1942), and two “earth” books, The Earth and Reveries of Rest (1946) and The Earth and Reveries of Will (1948).

6. Quote from Michael Scott online interview by curator Amy Scott, Autry Artist Salon, Autry Museum of the American West, September 9, 2020: https://theautry.org/PastArtistsSalons 7.. Ecological psychology was first delineated in 1954 by James J. Gibson, founder of this field of studies. An overview of the field can be found in Harry Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).

8. Michael Scott online interview by curator Amy Scott, Autry Artist Salon, Autry Museum of the American West, September 9, 2020: https://theautry.org/PastArtistsSalons

messenger of bitterroot

2016–2020, oil on linen, 58 x 87 in. deer in life boat

1993, oil on panel, 7.5 x 10.5 in.

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birch and boulders (field study)

interior woods path (field study)

the witness

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2018–2021, oil on linen, 87 x 58 in.

castle geyser 1 (field study)

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Grey geyser 1 (field study)

Grey geyser 2 (field study)

castle geyser 2 (field study)

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2014, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

borealis night boundary waters (field study)

light shaft yellowstone (field study)

breaking light two medicine lake glacier

2019, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

2014, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

(field study)

2015, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

monhegan island (field study)

phoenix 1 newfoundland

2006, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

1985–1986, oil on linen, 50 x 66 in.

Private collection

rising storm glacier (field study)

two medicine lake (field study)

white caps rainy lake (field study)

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2019, oil on paper, 8 x 10 in.

olympia full moon (field study)

opposite

2017, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

olympia full moon summer soltice

2017–2019, oil on linen, 90 x 58 in.

above and following spread (detail)

rising storm glacier

2015–18, oil on linen, 57 x 86 in.

wind at lion’s head

lake superior shore

1986, oil on linen, 73 x 58 in.

Private collection

1988, oil on linen, 32 x 36 in.

Private collection

thermal pool 1

winter owl phoenix

2014, oil on panel, 7 x 5 in.

1994, oil on linen, 72 x 70 in.

Private collection

divining water

2018–2021, oil on linen, 58 x 87 in.

glacier gate

2016–2019, oil on linen, 36 x 86 in.

late light crater lake

2016–2020, oil on linen, 58 x 96 in.

bitterroot 1 (field study)

bitterroot 2 (field study)

red trees two medicine lake

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2015–2019, oil on linen, 88 x 58 in.

Private collection

paradise lost

2016–2019, oil on linen, 57 x 76 in.

yosemite half dome 1 (field study)

yosemite halfdome 3 (field study)

above and following spread (detail)

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

elk fire half dome

2013–2018, oil on linen, 57 x 86 in.

Fire is the ultimate dialectical tool, capable . . . of deconstructing the text of the world into its constituent parts and of fusing them into a new synthesis.

—Stephen Pyne*

on fire amy scott Executive Vice President, Research and Interpretation, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Arts Autry Museum of the American West Los Angeles, California

* Fire in the Mind: Changing Understandings of Fire in Western Civilization, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 5 June 2016, Vol. 371, No. 1696, 1.

Michael Scott sometimes takes years to complete a painting. His lengthy, meticulous process—which includes layering colors over one another as he continually re-evaluates the composition—results in works that are complex in both their formal construction and the stories they tell, which ask serious questions about art and morality. Scott launched his career as a landscape painter with works that spoke to environmental concerns of the late 1970s and 80s, such as acid rain and deforestation (see opposite page). He later shifted to figurative and still life painting, crafting elaborate floral arrangements and tables brimming with luscious flowers, decadent cakes (often made in his kitchen), and exotic-looking birds with extravagant plumage (mostly fancy chickens kept in his backyard). Overseen by art historical figures such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, and the Western painter Henry Farny, Scott’s paintings and they stories they contain are seductive in their realism and provocative in the questions they raise, delighting our senses and prompting us to reconsider what we think is real and true.

In recent years, Scott has shifted his focus back to landscape, a move that represents less of a branching out than it does a return to his roots. Born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Scott studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, a progressive Midwest institution famed for the presence of Thomas Hart Benton in its early years and that counts among its alumni Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, and Dennis Hopper. In 1975, during his third year of study, Scott received a fellowship to attend the Maine-based Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, an intensive summer program for emerging artists. Established in 1946 by a group of figurative painters,

acid rain forest

1988, oil on linen, 48 x 52 in.

Private collection

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Skowhegan emphasized representational painting while tackling also some of the figure/ground relationships that had been at the forefront of modernism for decades.

Among its faculty were the “realist” painters Alex Katz and Rackstraw Downes, artists who remained committed to figurative and landscape subjects throughout the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, emerging on the other side by the 1970s as champions of the “new” East Coast figurative painting. As the painter, critic, and Skowhegan teacher Fairfield Porter stated in the catalog to his own retrospective: Whenever I make a somewhat different painting, someone is sure to ask, Is this a new direction? They want to know what you are planning next. But I think this question arises from the misconception that what is interesting in painting is the ideas it expresses. Painters are concerned with things.

Art and Ecology From Kansas City, Scott moved in 1976 to Cincinnati, where he completed an MFA at the University of Cincinnati while exhibiting regularly in New York. For the young landscape painter, these were pivotal years. As critics and curators debated the legitimacy of abstraction versus representation and commercial imagery versus “high” art, another group of artists sought to combine aspects of minimalism with investigations of the environment, taking the physical world (especially the vast expanses of seemingly “open” land still seen in the American West) as their subject.

Land Art, exemplified by the work of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, helped reorient audiences to current ecological thinking, wherein the earth was seen as a physical object, one vulnerable to depletion, in constant flux, and under assault by human industry. During the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), the federal government opened millions of acres of federal lands to mining and drilling while rolling back environmental protections designed to limit pollution. Simultaneously, the world was rocked by a series of large-scale industrial disasters, including the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, which sickened hundreds, contaminated water sources and food supplies across Europe, and spiked cancer rates for years to come among those who had lived in the region.

Three short years later, in 1989, the California-bound oil tanker Exxon Valdez hit a reef off Alaska’s Prince William Sound, leaking millions of gallons of oil into the sea, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, eagles, and orcas and earning the dubious title of the biggest environmental disaster of the 20th century. These and other events, as well as Rachel Carson’s influential treatise on the environmental toxicity of agricultural pesticides, Silent Spring, gave rise to the idea that environmental

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destruction was not just an industrial failing but an ethical one, driven by corporate profits at the expense of the environment, native species, and the local communities that depend on it. Many of these themes were taken up by photographers such as Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, who called out the banality of an illusory past, when so-called “pristine” landscapes still defined American nature. Their work gained a foothold in museum collections following the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House, in Rochester (restaged at SFMOMA in 2010). While the exhibit was widely critiqued for elevating the everyday markings of human activity, such as gas stations, suburbs, and strip malls, it also helped fuel an anti-romanticism then emerging in other sectors of the art world, from Pop to Land Art: that the American landscape was little more than its industrial leavings, a scene of disruption and disrepair rather than of inspiration and awe.

Scott’s early landscape work combined the attention to material forms and threedimensional space exhibited by his Skowhegan mentors with the environmental concerns that were then surfacing in landscape photography. To these issues and ideas he also brought aspects of surrealism and romanticism, which combined to create scenes at once beautiful and damaged. In 1988, six of Scott’s landscape paintings were selected for the 41st Corcoran Biennial—works that focused on acid rain and deforestation, haunted by ghostly creatures. Erik’s Wolf (see following page), for example, shows an animal moving through a blackened forest in the dead of winter under hazy skies. Camouflaged amidst the burned trees and the brownish light, the presence of the phantom wolf leads viewers to wonder whether it is real at all—and, if so, what future it has within this poisoned world.

Art, Narrative, Ecology As images of sprawl and pollution became increasingly visible on museum walls, scholars likewise began to question the viability of wilderness as a construct, and its role in configuring our relationship with landscapes near and far as inextricable from the political and industrial events that shape them. William Cronon’s seminal 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature” explores how the cleavage of so-called “wilderness” landscapes from daily life has imperiled environments elsewhere, by teaching society to value the aesthetic allure and symbolic power of distant mountains and forests rather than see nature as something that surrounds, supports, and permeates our daily lives. As Cronon points out, the concept of wilderness is as much a human creation as a toaster or a bicycle, yet wilderness is also different from other commodities in its history and its making. And, as such, the power of wilderness extends far beyond the borders of our national parks.

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In the 21st century, the costs of our failure to see the environment more holistically has become impossible to ignore. In an era in which climate change has brought a seemingly endless cycle of environmental crises, focus has shifted again, from manmade accidents (such as chemical spills and agricultural toxins in groundwater) to the emergence of serial, catastrophic weather events and their human toll. Whether they are hurricanes in the South, tornados in the Midwest, “superstorms” in the Northeast, or fires on the West Coast, these disasters have decimated communities, dominated news cycles, and cost hundreds of billions in cleanup and economic losses. In 2018, the Camp Fire, an inferno sparked by power lines, incinerated the entire town of Paradise, California, along with more than eighty of its residents, signaling the arrival of what scientists have termed, ominously, the “mega-fire.”

As the need to reconfigure our relationship to the environment along principles of sustainability has become a matter of existential urgency, Scott has (naturally) returned to landscape. In 2011, he launched a new series that he titled Preternatural, a reference to the otherworldly, unpredictable, or inexplicable aspects of our environment that often escape our daily attention. Webster’s defines “preternatural” as “existing outside of nature; exceeding what is natural; inexplicable by ordinary means,” and, importantly, “psychic.” Beginning with a visit to the Grand Canyon in 2012, Scott spent long stretches of time camping in many of the very places that define American wilderness—not only in the summer but also the winter, when ice and snow dramatically change the experience of place (see following spread). Based on extensive sketches made on site, the Preternatural series evolved over the next ten years into a conversation between the popular legacy of wilderness preservation as “America’s Best Idea” and its more troubled impact on how we perceive and interact with nature on a larger global scale.

That Scott decided to question the meaning of wilderness from within its most hallowed spaces speaks to his storytelling capacity and the narrative power of landscape as a genre. Although void of human figures, the Preternatural series features characters throughout. Forests and trees, mountains and rocks, deer, elk, wolves, and owls all speak to us from within the paintings. The lead actors are, however, unquestionably the elemental forces of water, earth, air, and fire, which shape the compositions in ways that are visually beautiful but often unexplained by the laws of physics that govern more traditional landscapes. These effects are especially pronounced in the fire paintings, for reasons that are both obvious and ironic. Fire is known to behave in mercurial and potentially dangerous ways; it can begin suddenly and spread rapidly, making it difficult to contain, let alone study. Then there is the relative invisibility (compared with water, earth, and atmosphere) of fire in landscape art, which suspends our expectations erik’s wolf

1986, oil on linen, 70 x 72 in.

Private collection

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grand canyon east rim 1 (field study)

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in. opposite

grand canyon east rim 2 (field study)

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in. grand canyon south rim (field study)

2013, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

of how it looks and what it means in an artistic context. This factor can be explained partly by the fact that, since the establishment of the National Park system, fire has been systematically extinguished, suppressed, managed, and contained—viewed, essentially, as a blight on the land rather than a benefit to the aesthetic experience on which the existence of wilderness depends. This has been true since the romantic era, when Albert Bierstadt’s 1865 painting Domes of Yosemite (see page 126), a massive landscape that features a huge waterfall and made the artist both famous and rich, was, in fact, equally if not more a product of fire then it was of water. Long before Bierstadt set foot in Yosemite, Native peoples had used fire to create the valley’s lush, grassy meadows that artists so admired; these meadows not only provided sight lines for hunting, they also allowed for the cultivation of grasses used to make the baskets

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essential to food gathering, processing, and cooking. After Yosemite Valley was granted to the state of California in 1864 (the surrounding national park was created in 1890), Native people continued to live there far longer than in many other places with similar designations. Their presence, however, was relegated to the sphere of domestic labor and tourist sideshows, their baskets transformed from cultural staples to salable curios.

A rare exception to this phenomenon can be seen in Jules Tavernier’s Forest Fire in a Moonlit Landscape, a surreal scene of rock spires lit by an eerie glow (see page 127).

Prevented from entering the scene by the burning trees in the foreground, viewers see and understand the painting’s fire as a barrier both visual and physical.

More than one hundred years later, our understanding and perceptions of fire, especially relative to wilderness landscapes, has morphed again. In the late 20th

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jules tavernier Yosemite (Forest Fire in a Moonlit Landscape), 1886 Pastel on paper, 42 x 25 in.

Gift of Mrs. Mary C. Hanchette The Collection of the Oakland Museum of California Oakland, California

century, rising temperatures and years of record drought contributed to a series of epic fires, mostly sparked by lightning, in national parks including Yellowstone and Yosemite. These burned millions of acres and required huge amounts of state and federal resources to contain. Like the scorched earth left in their wake, the fires also laid bare the real economic and ecological cost of decades’ worth of fire suppression policies. Within the National Parks Service, administrators began to re-evaluate their approach to natural fires, allowing them to burn where possible and implementing more prescribed burning in areas long denied natural fire regimens. Computers and improved record keeping helped measure and track data, such as length between fires and potential for their recurrence based on factors including vegetation and climate.

Retroactive fire behavior models were developed to understand the consequences of suppression. Weather satellites, topographic data, and digital fire simulation programs allowed researchers to better predict where, when, and how fires would erupt, and to what extent they were likely to spread.

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Albert Bierstadt The Domes of Yosemite, 1867 Oil on canvas, 116 x 180 in.

Gift of Horace Fairbanks St. Johnsbury Athenaeum St. Johnsbury, Vermont

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The environmental historian Stephen Pyne has noted how different cultural narratives have been generated by and around our history with fire. According to Pyne: Our conception of fire is dangerously narrow. We think of it as a mechanical tool like an ax, when it most often resembles a domesticated species ... or a captured ecological process like a grizzly bear trained to dance.

Scott’s fire paintings speak more to fire’s mysteries than its truths, to the unchained grizzly than the dancing bear. For an artist who launched his career during the formative years of the environmental movement, the image of fire would become both a recurrent metaphor and a figure in his work, appearing and reappearing in different places and forms in twenty paintings made in ten different parks, from Cobscook Bay in Maine, to Washington’s Mount Rainier. On the one hand, Scott’s fire paintings represent (like the Preternatural series in its entirety) an homage to the popular myths that every year drive millions of tourists to these places in search of epic scenery and dramatic skies. On the other, they are something else entirely, haunted by forces that are neither discernibly human nor entirely natural. It is through the imagery of fires large and small—campfires, embers, geological heat, ranging infernos, plumes of smoke, and red skies—that Scott weaves his best stories.

The first of Scott’s Preternatural paintings to explore the image of fire was Smoldering Fire, Grand Canyon, completed in 2016 (see following spread). In this large-scale, panoramic-style painting, the famous gorge is lit by a glowing sunset, the orange, pink, and purple light illuminating the canyon’s strata and deep space. In these ways, the painting is an homage to its many romantic predecessors, epitomized by the work of Thomas Moran, whose 1874 masterwork Chasm of the Colorado (opposite) secured the canyon’s status a symbol of the rugged beauty and the deep, geological time that defined the western landscape. At the same time, Scott’s painting, unlike Moran’s, depicts not a natural drama but a human one, the key to which is a small wisp of smoke in the center of the image that drifts upward from somewhere within the canyon, raising questions about its origins and intent. Is this the last ember of a campfire set by one of the millions of tourists drawn to the site each year that will, without care, grow out of control? Or is it, perhaps, the last breath of a wildfire that has ripped through the landscape beyond our view? As with most of Scott’s fire paintings, the cause of ignition is ultimately obscured. A similar phenomenon occurs in Fire Orb (see page 132), which depicts an oblong sphere of red and orange light that emanates mysteriously from the dense undergrowth of the forest floor in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park, rising upwards until it fills the entire canvas. Strangely symmetrical plumes of

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thomas moran Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–1874 Oil on canvas, 84.4 x 144.8 in.

U. S. Department of the Interior Museum Washington, DC

smoke delineate a space of atmospheric consistency in the middle, creating a glowing egg shape that illuminates the center of the painting. According to Scott: The egg is a powerful symbol, representing the earth, fertility and resurrection.

Ancient peoples linked egg magic to creation itself. Both fire and the egg are symbols of the emergence of life and the idea of rejuvenation within the cycle of life ... [the] egg shape reflects connection with the earth and is symbolic of the earth’s fertility.

While the smoldering embers threaten to ignite at any moment, the orb of light and heat at the center of the painting offers a portal to renewal. Light, space, and a sense of renewal are also central to historical landscape painting, but here, again, these elements act in a more ambivalent fashion, smoldering beneath the surface, their presence both alluring and menacing.

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smoldering fire grand canyon

2012–2018, oil on linen, 58 x 87 in.

opposite

fire orb

2015–2018, oil on linen, 80 x 57 in.

In other works, the fires are distinctly more threatening. In Fire Tornado Redwoods (see following page), painted in Redwood National Park, in Northern California, the fire has turned aggressive and treacherous. From the center of the painting, a cyclone of fire twists upwards, engulfing most of the canvas and the trees within it. Redwood trees are among the oldest and most resilient life forms on earth, possessing a thick layer of bark that acts as a shield while their canopies capture more carbon than any other tree species; individual trees can live up to 1,500 years. During the summer of 2020, when several particularly vicious wildfires swept through parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, most of these extraordinary trees survived. The source of the fire in Fire Tornado Redwoods remains unclear, as does the fate of the landscape that it threatens. Although protected from logging and industry, redwoods remain vulnerable to climate change, as increased temperatures tend to dry the smaller, younger trees that surround them while reducing the protective layer of coastal fog that helps sustain many of these forests.

Although there are no figures in Scott’s landscapes, there is a persistent tangential presence of humans, the hidden fire starters and drivers of climate change. Other animals are there, too, as witnesses to fires set and as ghosts of the natural world, lingering in spirit form as their environments disintegrate around them. Wolves skulk and deer wander through many of Scott’s paintings, but most consistently present are owls, which often appear as transparent, spectral forms, more spiritual than physical in nature. In Ghost Owls Mt Rainier (see page 137), two birds are seen on either side of a campfire that brings warmth to a cold night. The one on the left is in motion, flying out of the painting, while the other sits stoically in the trees on the right. One in flight and the other grounded, the two owls represent the ways in which fire can suddenly move or change course, as well as its geological omnipresence. They function as spirit guides in a narrative that links the small, transitory, and man-made campfire to the ancient, eternal, geological fire that is at the heart of the distant volcano, equating human and geological forces as conjoined in the creation—and destruction—of wilderness.

This combination of visual beauty and physical danger is central not only to Scott’s fire paintings but also to the process of chemical combustion that sparks fire in the natural world, whether by human design or not. What separates Scott’s fire paintings, then, from art historical precedent is not his ability to paint grand landscapes (although that is clearly also on display) or the awesome forces that shape them, but his dual attention to the metaphysical sensations and metaphorical ideas evoked by such contradictory elements. Like fire, which must be ignited in order to exist, Scott’s artistic, creative process is an open-ended one, sparked by a multiplicity of interpretations when it comes to landscape in Western art. As with all his work, the meanings of the

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opposite

fire tornado redwoods

2015–2019, oil on linen, 99 x 58 in.

fire paintings can change depending on whether we, the viewers, choose to see fire as destructive or beneficial—and the natural world as a place separate from us or one designed by our imagination. These are important questions in 21st-century California, where the presence of wildfire has become a daily fact of life. As ecologists and other specialists in fire management have increasingly noted, controlled fires are critical in preventing out-of-control ones, making the adage “fighting fire with fire” a literal mantra for living within a warming planet. As Scott’s works explore the awesome power and unknowable nature of fire, they speak back to older wilderness ideals of mastery over nature and our culturally conditioned responses to it, ranging from romantic awe to short-sighted fire-suppression policy. By speaking simultaneously to fire as a force both cultural and natural, Scott asks his viewers to embrace the idea that these are not dichotomous but entwined and inseparable forces.

Notes 1. “Fairfield Porter, 68, a Realist in an Age of Abstract Art, Dies,” 20 September 1975 New York Times, 32.

2. The Cherynobl explosion killed two and hospitalized 134 of the staff and first responders, many of whom died from acute radiation syndrome in the weeks that followed. Dozens more died within the following decades of radiation-induced cancer.

3. Stephen Pyne, “Pyromancy: Stories in the Flames,” Conservation Biology, 18:4 (August 2004). 875.

4. See Carol Miller and Brett Davis, “Quantifying the Consequences of Fire Suppressions in Two California National Parks,” The George Wright Forum, 26: 1 (2009), 76–83.

5. Pyne, “Pyromancy: Stories in the Flames,” 876.

6. Note that Cosbrook in Maine is a state park, not a national park.

7. Michael Scott, email to the author, date.

137

breaking clouds, Mt. rainier (field study)

above and following spread (detail)

2016, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

ghost owls Mt. Rainier

2016–2019, oil on linen, 58 x 84 in.

fire ice pacific

2013–2018, oil on linen, 50 x 96 in.

fire orb study 1 (field study)

fire orb study 2 (field study)

fire and ice 1

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2015, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2016–2018, oil on linen, 85.5 x 57 in.

Private collection

ridge fire (field study)

ritual fire (field study)

winter owl over fire

2020, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2020, oil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

Private collection

2014–2018, oil on linen, 88 x 58 in.

Private collection

pathay with moon rising

on island slash and burn

2015, oil on panel, 10.5 x 8.5 in.

Private collection

2019–2020, oil on linen, 19.4 x 24 in.

titans cup revisited

2020–2021, oil on linen, 15 x 24 in.

Private collection

Acknowledgments

(detail)

ghost wolf

1996, oil on panel/oil on linen, 26 x 65 in.

This catalog represents four decades of work using the landscape as metaphor, primarily for environmental and spiritual discussions. Over the last ten years it has evolved into what I now call my Preternatural series. Since the very beginning there have been numerous supporters who have aligned themselves with the ideas and images associated with this project, and for that I am forever grateful.

Many thanks to Laura Finlay Smith, of the Tia Collection, for her critical eye; Marilyn Scripps, with her ongoing belief in my work and generous financial support; Amy Scott, Chief Curator at the Autry Museum of the West, who took the chance on being the first museum to give the series a venue; Evoke Contemporary, who has supported the project with two major exhibitions, one of which paralleled Laura Fry’s stunning exhibit of the series at the Gilcrease Museum of Art; Phillip Long and Elizabeth Pierce, who together saw an opportunity to merge art and science in an exciting and unconventional exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center; and MaLin Wilson-Powell, whose many studio visits assisted in fleshing out paintings’ meanings and the stories they hold.

I am especially grateful for my collaboration with book designer David Skolkin for producing this thoughtful design. Eve Tolpa, my book editor, often made sense out of nonsense, bringing clarity, fluidity, and structure to all the words contained in this book.

And, finally, my thanks to Ellie Cohen Scott, who has shared many of my landscape journeys over the years, providing a multitude of discussions relating to history, meaning, and artistic purpose.

I hope that the images and ideas expressed in this book inspire exploration and spark inquiries into the world we inhabit.

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©2021 Michael Scott. Introduction and essays copyright each respective author.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means whatsoever without the express written consent of the publisher.

Director: Anna Gallegos Editorial Director: Lisa Pacheco Art Director and Book Designer: David Skolkin Editor: Eve Tolpa Composition: Minion with Trajan display Printed in Singapore by Pristone Ltd. on acid-free paper.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Control Number: TK ISBN: TK hardcover Preternatural exhibit venues: Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California, September 15, 2018 – July 28, 2019 Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 28, 2019 – July 20, 2019 Gilcrease Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma, August 17, 2020 – February 20, 2021 Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico, December 27, 2020 – February 20, 2021

Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, May ?, 2022 – Oct ?, 2022 Museum of New Mexico Press PO Box 2087 Santa Fe, NM 87504 mnmpress.org