From Atlantic Realism to Erotic Introspection: Stephen Scott Unveiled

New Brunswick painter Stephen Scott ‘s work is usually viewed within the linear legacy of Canada’s Atlantic Realism movement. While there is no question that his early landscape and portrait work is rooted in that tradition, his career as a professional artist has propelled him far beyond what is regarded as Atlantic Realism. Notably his travel around the world has removed his evolution as a painter from being defined as a purely regional expression. His work has gone through vast transformations through continual examination of what painting means to him; and more objectively an examination of how an artist finds meaning through the content of his work. Over the years he has gradually turned more inward and has produced some of his most beguiling and erotic works.

Fig.1  Untitled (woman with veil (©Stephen Scott)

Fig.2  Studio nude (©Stephen Scott)

Fig.3  Self with G String (©Stephen Scott)

Neo-Baroque Bravado

His recent paintings in particular, focused on self-portraiture and on the female figure that he produces with his wife Sophie in the intimacy of his studio, has evolved into an authoritative body of figurative work that examines aspects of his private world as an artist. Whereas his brushstrokes can sometimes remind us of the contemporary neo-Baroque bravado of a Lucian Freud, more often than not, it feels more like a lost art, an art of the 19thand early 20th century.  It  feels more like the dark erotic orientalist romanticism of Théodore Géricault or Eugene Delacroix, to the transitional work from orientalism to Japonisme of John Singer Sargent, works imbued with the forms of erotic contemplation you find in earlier 19th century painting.

Fig.4  Studio nude 2 (©Stephen Scott)

Fig.5  Nude self-portrait (©Stephen Scott)

'Dirty Realism'

Fast forward and one also feels the hint of the darkness of suburban American life depicted in the stories of American writers such as John Cheever or Raymond Carver, sometimes called writers of ‘dirty realism’. His portraits work as a synthesis of Scott’s exploration of painting references as well as an expression of where he finds himself as an artist at this particular point in his life. He is finding a balance between how he sees himself as an artist struggling with issues in painting and how he sees himself in a bigger picture, isolated from the outside world and attempting to communicate with the outside using only paint as a medium.

Fig.6  The Swing (©Stephen Scott)

Continue reading in Premium and discover more on the voyeuristic aspects in Scott's work, the BDSM influences in his Untitled, Veiled Woman painting, an analysis of his “Self-Portrait with a G-string” piece, and more pics.

Click HERE for an article on the eroticism in the work of the Russian painter Viktor Lyapkalo

Stephen Scott's website can be found here

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