 Scott Saw
By Amy Young
California artist Scott Saw is a creator of fantastic worlds. Each one of his shows takes you to a new place that blends fantasy and reality while reflecting Scott’s most current obsessions, interests, personal challenges and growth. The futuristic atmosphere he often creates symbolizes triumph of adversity and continuation of the exploration of life, as well as both evolution and technological advances. His work often employs an ethereal homage to nature and its unyielding presence, while still remaining timeless.
He is a prolific painter who shows frequently in California and around the U.S. He has most recently been preparing for his show Microcosm, which premiers at Palm Springs’ M Modern Gallery on May 20th. I yanked him away from his work for a bit to give the details on his history, vision and the upcoming solo show. –Amy Young
AY: Do you remember your earliest artistic inclinations?
SS: Growing up with an artist father definitely spurred my interest at a young age. My dad worked out of a home studio so I would see him painting often. He had a collection of about 30 amazing sketch books and I loved flipping through them when I was young. It was cool to make the connection between the drawings that later became paintings. Around age 10 my folks gave me a bunch alien/fantasy/sci-fi art books and books of work by MC Escher. I spent a lot of time studying these images and they have no doubt had a profound effect on the work I do today.
My dad taught art and design for 30 years. In my pre/early teens he gave me the same drawing and design lessons that he gave his college students so I was able to grasp the basic concepts at a young age.
AY: What a cool Pops you have! Did you know back then that you were seriously going to follow the art path?
SS: For as long as I can remember I have had a passion for art and have always envisioned becoming an artist. Even back in elementary school I was the go-to guy for drawing clouds and trees. All through my teens I drew a lot - very depressing suicidal stuff - I was influenced by hardcore album covers back in the day – The Exploited, Black Flag, GBH, etc. I dropped high school and got sucked into drugs for a number of years and thx to my parents consistent encouragement and my strong desire to escape that confusion, I snapped out of it in my early 20s and began attending college. I made up for my lost high school years at a JC and then advanced to SDSU to study art. My dad, having struggled as an artist, encouraged me to also study business, and as hard as that was to swallow at the time I’m now glad I took his advice. It took about 6 years but I got a degree in both art and marketing.
AY: When did you transition from drawing to painting?
SS: I didn’t start taking painting seriously until I got to State college. I would get really into painting these cheesy still-life settings. As horrible as that sounds now – I'm really glad that I got into it back then because I learned to paint form pretty well and how to move paint around quickly. It wasn’t till after college that I was able to channel inspiration through my art and produce work that I really felt had anything of value to offer the world.
AY: Do you remember some of the first paintings you did?
SS: Yeah – the one that sticks out in my mind was a painting I did when I was around 7 or so – it was about a guy underwater shooting up all the fishes – there was blood everywhere. When I proudly showed my mom – she freaked – it really spooked her. Other than that I used to copy sci-fi book covers just to see how close I could come to the original.
AY: What else inspires you?
SS: For the last few years I have been really channeling major life events through my art. In 2004 I created a series of paintings titled “Curtains – The Wonder of Life and the Mystery of Death” which was triggered by the death of a loved one – through this body of work my consciousness of spirituality was awoken. Last year I created a series titled “Flipside” that explored the spiritual aspect of having my first child and entangled birth, death, memory with the warped fabric of space and time.
Currently I am very fascinated with physics, cosmology and with grasping concepts like string theory. In fact, every painting in my current series contains design elements that are based on the vibrational patterns made by strings in string theory. The series is called “Microcosm” and one of the ideas expressed in the work is that things that appear macroscopic on one scale are microscopic on another scale.
AY: It sounds as though you've reached a point where your series are all coming from a combination of your personal experiences and your interests/passions. Do you ever feel the need to "create" more life experiences to take your work further or are you finding that just life, organically, is enough to keep inspiring you?
SS: Memory and nostalgia play an important role in my work and many of my paintings are inspired by events and feelings that I have experienced. So in that sense it’s important to continue creating memories but I don’t feel like I need to do anything extreme to generate new ideas for my art. Ideas just come to me and somehow I combine them with observations and feelings and then convey them in a way that I hope will be meaningful to a viewer. Sometimes ideas and visions flow rapidly and I try to record them in sketches before they fade away. Other ideas stew in my brain for years and then come out in a way that seems relevant at that time. Most of my major series of work were conceived in a period of a day or two – then the idea and technique evolves over a production phase of 6 months or so.
Discovering new ways to express ideas and emotions through painting comes very natural to me. I find the production technique to be equally as important as the subject matter, so I am constantly experimenting with new ways to put an image together.
AY: You’ve got a wonderful wife and fairly new baby. How is your family involved in your work?
SS: Family is very important to me and I incorporate experiences involving family members into my work frequently. I generally make my work more universal by depicting people as animals or wooden robots. Having a baby recently has caused me to reminisce about things I did with my family while growing up and some of those ideas are working their way into my work. For example one of my recent paintings “Flight School” is about my grandpa teaching me how to make a kite out of newspaper and sticks. The painting was based on an old family photo although I converted my grandpa into a robot with a tree-trunk body.
AY: Do you have thoughts about where you'd like your career to go?
SS: I love making art and it would be a dream come true if I could completely support my family doing something I am so passionate about. I’ve been showing regularly in solo and group shows for 4 years now. Throughout that time I have definitely seen my career head in a positive direction. I am going to continue on this path for the foreseeable future and I hope for the best. Making art is definitely therapy for me, so it’s very important to me that I stay true to my art and don’t compromise my vision for a buck.
AY: So since it’s taking time away from your current show to do this interview, tell us all about it.
SS: “Microcosm” is an exhibition of new paintings at M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs which opens May 20th and runs till June 10th. There will be 30 new paintings on display as well as a selection of other recent paintings and silk-screen prints.
The work was created during the first months of my new son Kai’s life. With a new baby in the house and working out of my home studio all day and night I have been very isolated – in fact, my wife turned my car into a storage shed for months because it never left the driveway! This solitude amongst my home and family has certainly influenced my recent work. The paintings all take place on ‘islands’ floating in space and they are full of iconography relating to space, nature and technology. Rockets take the form of birds and fish, cities grow into tree-like structures and robots have tree trunk torsos. There is also a sense of family life in the new work. In one painting a robot father teaches his son about fishing. In another, a family of robots wave to another family member as he passes by their ultra modern space-home in a fish shaped rocket.
“Microcosm”
New art by Scott Saw
May 20, 2006 – June 20, 2006
Reception: May 20, 2006, 7-11 pm www.scottsaw.com
M Modern Gallery,
448 N. Palm Canyon, Palm Springs, CA 92262
PH: (760) 325-9135 www.mmoderngallery.com
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