Bill Scott’s solo show Two Decades at Hollis Taggart Gallery’ celebrates this painter’s long career of collaboration with this renowned New York City gallery. Bill, a fairly reserved individual, often clad in neutral colors at gallery openings, produces profoundly beautiful works bursting with color. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bill, a friend and mentor for more than 15 years, dating back to my days as an undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Was painting your first love? How did it all start?
I always drew when I was little. Starting in kindergarten, my parents enrolled me in a Quaker school, for which I am extremely grateful. I attended art classes every year, and in 5th grade, we learned about artists and art history. This was amazing to me and helped me be more curious to learn about history, which was mostly limited to military battles, names of presidents and rulers, and changing borders. I preferred seeing the artworks and learning about artists. Although I did not know one could grow up to be an artist. I thought being a painter was something that only happened in the past. But in high school, I started visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation, and I learned about the existence of commercial art galleries.
Home life when I was young was chaotic and traumatizing. Every night my parents drank excessively, smoked, argued constantly, endlessly screaming at each other. I love them, but I hated it and wanted to go away. My grandmother was an actress, and her parents, who I never knew, were opera singers. All of them, I was told, had quit their artistic professions because, in the arts, they did not like the other people with whom they worked. Years later, an older painter, sympathizing with this, recounted how Thomas Mann wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that artists are second only to murderers in their unscrupulousness. Even so, I wanted to exist within a community of artists and was determined to not be discouraged by the people I met there. Although I’ve not always managed to succeed at that. I wrote letters to a few of the artists whose exhibitions I saw at local galleries and asked if I could see their studios.
I also attended numerous concerts, mostly by singer-songwriters. The singer I was most drawn to was Mimi Fariña, who came to Philadelphia about every six months to present two or three evenings of concerts in tiny clubs and coffee houses. I went to every performance. I loved her songs, which were like short stories and character studies. Buoyant but grim. Like several other wonderful singers I learned of through her, she had difficulty sustaining a career. She once told me that the difficulty of being in the arts is that it takes a career to have a career: there needs to be someone working to help sustain the artist. She added that, unfortunately, it is the artist who is usually tasked to be both artist and manager. When I was still in high school, at one of her concerts, Mimi announced she was stepping away from singing and founding a non-profit organization called Bread & Roses that would present music performances, magic acts, and even belly-dancing in institutions where the residents were shut-ins: old people’s homes, hospitals, AIDS wards, prisons, etc. In doing so she was able to bring tremendous pleasure to the lives of others and found a meaningful purpose for her own existence.
All of this was still bouncing around in my head at the start of art school, when the Dean gathered all the incoming students together. He too was buoyant but grim. He advised that painting requires hard work and proposed that in five years (one year after we would have left school) only ten of us would still be painting. And in five more years he predicted only five of us would continue to paint. I was determined to prove him wrong. Soon after I left school I worked in a commercial art gallery. I was never a political activist on par with Mimi. Yet, I felt purposeful in being able to offer solo exhibitions to artists I admired, often folks I knew from school. I hoped this opportunity and encouragement would make it impossible for them to quit. I wanted to make it possible for them to make more things possible for themselves. However, I reluctantly learned I do not have the power to make other people want to paint. Some of them did eventually quit. And there are days when I myself say I’d rather clean under my refrigerator than go upstairs to paint.
I’m grateful that I’ve been extremely fortunate in my life. I’ve known extraordinary people, traveled, and collaborated on inspiring and challenging projects. There are times when painting feels like a ridiculously pleasurable gift. But most of the time I am alone in my studio and when at an impasse with a painting I feel as if I am Sisyphus.
I know your process is intuitive and you typically have several pieces in progress. What do you usually think about when you paint? Are there guiding voices in your head? Is it different every time?
Thank you. Yes, I usually have about ten or twelve unfinished paintings with which I’m engaged. If I’m at an impasse with a canvas that is close to being complete yet still feels unresolvable, it helps to start a new one. Somehow focusing on the other one allows me to let go of the more completed one. Although I always have several canvases in various states of completion, I work on only one of them at a time. I face them to the wall when I’m not working on them. For me, painting is a completely non-verbal experience. I can’t paint if I’m troubled by something or thinking about the news. So, to clear my head I’ll go out for a long walk.
My studio is on the top floor of my house. It’s mostly filled with my older paintings, paintings-in-progress, and blank canvases. The visual prompts I have include fake flowers (some in a vase and others are tacked to the wall), two split-leaf philodendron plants, a wisteria branch, and a friend’s abstract sculpture. I’ve also got several postcards tacked to a wall. These rotate, but right now they are artworks by Boucher, Matisse, Morisot, Bonnard, and Ingres. I also, of course, have exhibition announcements from friends. They are there mostly as company. When painting, I mostly feel I’m hitting the ball back and forth with the painting. I love that famous quotation of Philip Guston’s where he explains how when he paints he metaphorically feels there are artists standing on his shoulders and of how, one by one they go away. When I was younger I felt there were a ton of inspirations and influences standing on my shoulders, sometimes arguing with each other as they prompted me how to steer my painting forward.
But in recent years, I’ve been there alone without any of them. My painting process, as you observed, is intuitive. Although I have doubts, I’m fine when I am in the studio. But in the painting world outside of my studio, I feel that I am the odd man out. I never know how to describe what painting is to me without fearing I sound like an idiot to the other person.
We’ve spoken before about finishing paintings and ‘letting them go’ so to speak, but where do they usually start?
When starting, I don’t have a clue what the finished painting will look like nor do I have a conscious goal. Using a palette knife, brush, or a rag, I apply two or three shapes of color, unmixed, straight out of the tube. And I’ll draw with a brush applying lines that echo the perimeter of the split leaf philodendron leaves, fake flowers, and branches I keep in my studio. Or I’ll respond to something I see from the window. In the beginning it’s all in response to reality. I just don’t depict any of it in sequential order to create a comprehensible, recognizable image. I blot the paint with paper to create a thinner application of paint on the canvas, Or I’ll scrape it off with a palette knife, or sand it down once it’s dry. If I’m not yet ready to lose or ruin a painting’s start, I’ll face the canvas to the wall and return to it a week or so later. By then I can allow myself to move forward without feeling hesitant if I need to paint over something I like as a way to improve the painting. I always say that when I am painting it is the only time in my life when I feel no fear. It’s almost as if I am not even there.
You draw quite a bit and I have seen some of your very representational self portraits and compositions. Where does representation stop and fantasy begins when it comes to your paintings? You have said in the past that your work is fictional, but your background is quite traditional and I’m curious to find out where your mind takes you when you create.
When I was younger I attended life-drawing classes and in art school I spent a year or so in cast-drawing classes. But drawing began to feel like a burden. In hindsight, I realize it probably was the cast drawing classes that unfortunately led me to equate drawing to homework. Drawing ceased being pleasurable or maybe it was because I no longer knew how to allow it to be pleasurable. So I stopped. It wasn’t until 1999, when I began making etchings and drypoints with the master-printmaker, Cindi Ettinger, that I started drawing again. I was inspired by the printed etched line because it seemed so much more authoritative than a pencil drawn line.
I don’t feel comfortable using the word fantasy when describing visual imagery because it makes me think of unicorns and dragons—neither of which figure in my paintings. When I was a teenager in high school, I loved the paintings of Fairfield Porter and Alice Neel. Back then, I went to New York to see their solo exhibitions at the Graham Gallery and at Hirschl & Adler. I loved painting figures and hoped I could grow up to be a figure painter like them. I enjoyed some abstract paintings but didn’t really “get it” and never imagined I’d paint abstractly. However, when I was in art school, I wasn’t assigned a private studio when most of my classmates were. A fourth-year sculpture student was going to be traveling for four or five weeks, and she invited me to paint in her studio while she was away. After painting in the same classroom with so many other students, it was a pleasure to be able to paint alone in her studio. I made a bunch of small works depicting the spaces between her sculptures. It wasn’t my intent, but these paintings all ended up being abstractions.
What is your favorite painting?
If you’re inquiring about my own work, I’d cite the singer-songwriter, Danny O’Keefe, who I overheard when a fan asked him which of his own songs was his favorite. There are many exquisite songs from which to pick and his reply was sublime. He simply said, “My favorite song is the one I’m working on now.” I feel that way about my own paintings. I love seeing my paintings together in an exhibition, but the part of the process in which I am the fully active participant occurs only while I am alone in the studio painting.
There are more than “many” artists whose artworks I love. I’ve always looked a lot at Berthe Morisot’s works, and in recent years, I’ve been drawn to some of the paintings by Corot and Albert Marquet. All three, to my eye, are equal parts colorists and tonalists. I try to achieve a parallel in my own work. I’m a colorist, but in a tonalist’s way, I want the color to heel, sit, and stay. I’ve always enjoyed seeing landscapes by Berthe Morisot’s older sister, Edma Morisot-Pontillon, who painted when she was in her 20s and a student of Corot’s. Of contemporary artists, I love Ruth Miller Forge’s paintings. They can appear to be simple, yet whenever I contemplate them, I feel they continually unfold to reveal more and more. And, it might sound foolish, but her paintings of cabbages feel to me as monumental and meaningful as Cezanne’s depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
When I was young, I wanted to see everything. I no longer feel there are contemporary artists who are giants and whose exhibitions I’d travel far to see. The artists whose works I love and would travel to see are those by my friends. I love seeing their paintings, yet as I become older, I also desperately want to just stay home and paint.
Your titles come after your work is completed, how do you usually come up with them?
I usually pick the titles just before I need to provide them to the gallery. It can feel difficult. Long rambling titles have always seemed pretentious to me. So when I was starting to exhibit I tried to simply have one word titles. The earliest work in this exhibition, Afternoon, is from that time. Years ago when a poet-friend visited me in my studio, I pleaded with him to help me think of titles. A few days later I received his postcard on which he inscribed a few suggestions. A Feinting Sweetness was one of them.
Several titles were lyrics lifted from songs by Richard Shindell and Leonard Cohen (An Irrefutable Fragrance is taken from Cohen’s writings), whose words and lyrics are extremely visual to me. The title, Wander Quietly, is from an old song by Richard Fariña that also has a beautiful line: And will this silence drive confusion from your soul? I’d be grateful if my paintings could drive away confusion for the viewer.
In a way, it’s easier to describe my choices for painting titles than it is for me to talk about the paintings. In early June, I visited the French Riviera. A friend there took me to Cimiez, the town just north of Nice, to see the home of the long-deceased painter Berthe Morisot. Several of the trees that were there in her lifetime are still there, but they’re now huge. And the house is now surrounded by a community garden. Prior to my visit there, I’d been working on one canvas off and on for months. When I returned home, I continued to work on the painting while images of the community garden drifted in and out of my thoughts. So, I titled the painting Cimiez. I don’t expect anyone else to find meaning in that, but it’s inextricably linked to my own associations with making the painting. And in this show, I’m glad to see Cimiez juxtaposed with the slightly earlier painting, An Interval of Silence. It wasn’t my intent, but in a non-verbal visual way, they parallel one another.
Almost twenty years ago when I taught, I worked with a younger artist, E.J. O’Hara. I was inspired when he was starting a lithograph based on xerox copies of black bow ties. I unsuccessfully encouraged him to try making a drypoint because I thought he could achieve a more saturated and velvety black with an intaglio print. He wasn’t interested but gave me a few of his xeroxes from which I made a drypoint that I called, A Landscape with Bow Ties (for E.J. O’Hara). Last spring E.J. visited me shortly after I’d started working on a painting with which I was at an impasse. He looked at it, liked it, and had lots of helpful thoughts. I was grateful to him for showing me how to see it through his eyes. I recommenced working on it, and every week or so, I would text an updated image of it to him. It’s one of the few works in this show that I painted specifically to one person, one muse. Unlike the earlier drypoint, this one has no bow ties. So I titled it, A Landscape without Bow Ties (for E.J. O’Hara).
This show is quite a retrospective, a summary of your two decades with the gallery. Do you feel like you are in your golden years as a painter where you need no apologies or explanations for beauty? Do you find it freeing?
Maybe I’m there, but I don’t feel I’m in my golden years. Even though I’ve painted almost every day for fifty years, I continually feel as if I’m just beginning to learn how to paint. It was the Hollis Taggart gallery director, Debra Pesci, who proposed presenting a mini twenty-year retrospective to celebrate the twenty years that I’ve been represented by the gallery. I’m grateful to Debra for suggesting it and for ignoring me when I tried to avoid her suggestion to do the show. We installed the nine most recent paintings in the larger second-floor gallery. Four earlier paintings, together with two or three recent smaller paintings, are in an adjoining room. I love that the paintings are presented in this way. Oh, and the largest painting, which was a last-minute addition to the show, For My Friend Who Painted Trees (2022, 58 x 72 inches), is hung in the second-floor window. So, one has to go outside and across the street to see it.
The twenty years I’ve worked together with Hollis Taggart feels as if it’s passed in a nanosecond. I sometimes doubt if I’d even exist were it not for my association with them. And I’m startled to see how much my own paintings have changed in the past twenty years. Because I agreed to this exhibition with such trepidation, I suppose my foot is in my mouth when I add that someday I hope I can have another exhibition that also includes some of the paintings I made in the first thirty years of my career.
How does your love for beauty in life translate into your paintings?
I am not painting the paintings specifically to be beautiful, but I suppose that’s what happens. I think that beauty is what I yearn for. I’m painting what I yearn for. Yet, when people question me about it I respond that seeking beauty is my own way of staying afloat. I’m painting against my feelings of despair. In my deep heart’s core, I am a sad and anxious guy. I waver between feeling I’m a hopeful-pessimist and a pessimistic-hopeful. I truly believe making paintings is what has prevented me from duck-taping art books to my feet and jumping off the South Street Bridge into the Schuylkill River.
I try to let it roll over me, but am annoyed when people cavalierly dismiss my work for being beautiful. In my worst moods, I’m tempted to caustically compliment them for their gorgeous come-get-me-shoes or their fancy, expensive clothing. Years ago, I sent an exhibition catalog of my paintings to the writer, Paul Monette. I love his memoirs and poetry which were vulnerable, eloquent, and politically searing. I enclosed an apologetic note, because I didn’t want him to think I didn’t already know my work could be criticized in this way. The kindness of his response stunned me. “By the way,” he wrote, “they are beautiful,” and continued, “never apologize for beauty. Whether one knows it or not, it is what everyone strives for.” I continue to be grateful for his kind response.
What is your favorite poem?
There are several, but the one I’ve known longest and which immediately pops into my thoughts is The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats. One evening in 1970, my father and I went to the Academy of Music to see the singer Judy Collins. I was a little kid, and it was exciting for me and extremely meaningful because it was one of the few things he and I did together. All these years later, I still remember some of the songs Collins sang that evening. But what I best remember is for her encore, as she stood in the purple glow of the stage lights, my father’s eyes became teary as she sang this poem. He’d known the poem since he was little, and she’d turned it into a bittersweet song. I later learned the poem, used parts of it as titles for numerous pastels, and read parts of it at my father’s memorial service. I love it, and the ending lines “While standing in the roadway, or in the pavement’s gray…” often makes me teary-eyed.
I often listen to recordings when I am painting in my studio. Usually, it’s music, but recently, I’ve been listening to Anderson Cooper’s podcast, All There Is. It fascinates me, explores thoughts and feelings I’ve wrestled with most of my life, and it makes me feel hopeful and purposeful even though it also almost always brings me to tears. Half my life ago, my parents, grandmother, and two important mentor-friends, Jane Piper and Joan Mitchell, died within two years of one another. After they were gone, I was startled to realize I finally was making the paintings I would have loved to share with them.
Having you as a mentor and a friend I know you are a philosopher and a humanist with deep insight into the human condition. You always said therapy can benefit everyone but I think it is particularly important for painters (speaking as one). Can you recall any profound breakthroughs or “aha” moments that have led you to where you are as a painter today?
You are very kind. As a child and younger person, I never felt I was competent enough to do anything. I drew all the time, which was something I could do alone, but I was just drawing. I wasn’t making drawings. When I was ten years old, in fifth grade, there was a teacher who introduced my classmates and me to the artworks of many artists: El Greco, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cassatt, Bonnard, Wyeth, etc. It was so inspiring to me. I started going, often by myself, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At that time I remember seeing exhibitions the Museum presented of works by Manet, Van Gogh, Degas, Brancusi, Ingres, and Gericault. And when I was in high school I saw three exhibitions that had a profound impact on me. These were important aha, or eureka moments for me. The first was a 1972 solo exhibition of the painterJane Piper at a commercial gallery here, followed by the Philadelphia College of Art’s 1973 memorial exhibition for the painter/printmaker Mitzi Melnicoff; and in early 1974, I saw Joan Mitchell’s painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum. I also loved going to the Barnes Foundation, where photography was not yet allowed, and no postcards or reproductions were available.
So, instead of looking at a postcard later on, I had to hold on to the memory of how it felt to stand before and look at the paintings. This was echoed for me when, still a teenager, I met two grandsons of Berthe Morisot. The older grandson still lived in the two-story Paris apartment where Morisot had lived in her 40s. The rooms were hung like the Barnes, floor to ceiling, with paintings by Morisot, Manet, Renoir, Monet, Degas, and others. The brothers didn’t lend works to exhibitions. The only way to be familiar with the works, aside from seeing them in person, was through black-and-white reproductions. I held the paintings in my mind’s eye and remembered the feeling I had when being in their presence. I sometimes wondered, if before recordings existed, this had been how people felt when thinking of music.
When I left art school, a painter-friend and I both applied to graduate schools. If we weren’t accepted, we agreed we’d go to therapy instead. Well, he went to graduate school, and I started seeing a therapist. I think therapy may be the most important thing I ever did to enable me to become and remain a painter. I think of it as the highest form of higher education. It made it possible for me to become a better painter than I’d ever have been able to become simply by going to an art school. And it enabled me to dive deeper and to safely realize how vulnerable and sad I feel. I needed to embrace that. When I was younger, I never wanted to feel sadness, and as a result, my repressed sadness frequently surfaced as anger.
To be able to see them, I felt people needed to stand at least four or five feet away from my paintings. For their own safety. I felt it best for them to remain the same distance from me. Therapy helped me make some of the spaces in my paintings recede in the way the space goes far back in a Hudson River landscape. Since then, when seeing my paintings, folks could both stand back as well as come up close. I hope they can do the same with me. I’m grateful for that.
Who are your ghosts of painting past? How have they looked over your shoulder in the way? Are they in the room when you paint? (I’m looking at Berthe over there)
As I alluded to earlier, I feel I am alone when I am in my studio. There’s no one on my shoulder. Sometimes I’m not even sure if I am there. I’ve always loved and, when younger, was in awe of Morisot’s color and calligraphic brushstrokes. To my eyes, they paralleled the way Joan Mitchell applied paint to canvas almost a century later. Morisot, Mitchell, and Jane Piper all used lots of white in their paintings – both as oil paint and as exposed areas of the primed canvas. I’ve always loved how I feel when I look at their canvases. But when I was younger, I emulated the appearance of their work. In my mind, I merged the feeling I had when seeing with the appearance of the paintings. I wanted to find a way to achieve that feeling. It wasn’t happening by painting my own versions of their works.
In 1999, when I started making intaglio prints with the master printer, Cindi Ettinger, I tried to stop using the color white. This was prompted by a desire to separate from Morisot, Mitchel, and Piper, as well as the realization how in color intaglio-printmaking, one does not use white. To achieve that lightness and luminosity, one simply applies a thinner layer of color. Slightly before and during the pandemic, I started making tons of watercolors on which the white ground is crucial. Since then, when making oil paintings, I’m again using white. I think making the prints, parallel to going to therapy, also helped me to become a better painter.
I have always admired your humbleness and openness. Your paintings have boundless energy and are quite magnetic. Would you say your work is a reflection of you and in what way?
Thank you, Anna. Yes, the paintings echo me in ways that I probably am unaware of. I’ve not made a conscious decision that this is how I am going to paint. I think the paintings come into existence this way almost subconsciously. I always say that the paintings that most interest me are those made before an artist knows how to make them. It’s the same with me. I have no interest in doing something I already know how to do. To me, each painting feels like a new experience, a struggle, and a delight.
I always feel I’m on the verge of failure, but I want the paintings to appear as if they were effortless to make and as if they couldn’t be any other way. All pleasure. Deep down inside, I am melancholic and rather sad. I hope this might help prevent the paintings from appearing as simply frivolous things. I am always doubting myself so I am glad if the paintings appear buoyant, magnetic, and energetic. It’s what I yearn for for myself.
All photos courtesy of the gallery unless otherwise indicated
Bill Scott Two Decades at Hollis Taggart through 16 November, 2024
About the writer: Anna Shukeylo is an artist, writer, educator, and curator working and living in the New York Metropolitan area. She has written for Artcritical, Painters on Painting, and ArtSpiel. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kean University, NJ, Manchester University, IN, and in group shows at Auxier/Kline, Equity Gallery, Stay Home Gallery, among others. @annashukeylo
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