Robert Austin Scott

Waddington's Auction House Biography and Notes

Robert Scott is a modernist Saskatchewan artist who has been experimenting with the formal qualities of paint since the early 1970s. He achieves a unique mode of expression by digging through the thick layer of pigment with his fingers, arms and elbows. Scott’s dramatic and imposing “walls of paint” exude powerful, all-over gesture and tortuous rhythms. The sense of controlled chaos and the tension present in Scott’s abstractions are characteristic of the action paintings from the mid-20th century. In Gypse Run (1986) and Cesar (1986-87), the painter produces colour field compositions that amalgamate bold textures and strong chromatic contrast.