Artist Statement by Scott McIntire

Three buildings, a Soda Restaurant Sign and an Accidental Octopus

As a parting tribute to leaving my midtown Manhattan studio, I began the series of works on paper of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Both buildings were part of the cityscape view from my studio window. The Flatiron, my other favorite building, was just a short walk down Broadway. Moving to Greenport, New York, opened up new iconic references, such as the Soda Restaurant sign in the center of the village. The octopus started as a segment of one of the Soda Restaurant paintings and took on a life of it’s own. For me, the Octopus is an almost mystical sea creature that easily rises to iconic status.

I begin my work with a central icon, something that resonates visual strength. This icon becomes the beginning of the story and the stimulus for a non-linear narrative that takes place around it. Layers of images and marks are applied over, under, and around the icon, and in the surrounding environment, creating a spatial depth that exists on the surface and doesn’t pretend to be illusionist. This method of painting is intuitive, the piece progresses as series of reactions to previously painted elements until completion.

It’s not enough anymore for me to render a solitary image or scene realistically. I need to express my reaction to the layers of images we are constantly bombarded with by our media. For me, the use of marks, shapes, and drops are a reflection of the outside noise and interference that is part of our daily life. Multi-tasking has become part of my routine and it is only natural to bring multi-images to my artwork.

While the icon is the main protagonist, the story is really about color and the materiality of painting. I use a graphic stencil technique, silk screened or hand cut, to render my images, because it allows me to concentrate on the impact of the colors. The colors I use unashamedly demand attention; they are sensual colors that sit on the surface and reinforce their two-dimensional quality. I use color wheels and checkered bars are used to reinforce the color story. To achieve the saturation of hue that I’m after, I paint with High Gloss Sign Enamel.

Crumpled Paper with Red Dotted Line

The Crumpled Paper works began as a conceptual exercise. I was interested in capturing an abstraction through realism. This study of crumpled paper topography demanded hours of intense rendering. I was then placed in an environment of intuitively reactive marks. Each print is a one of a kind piece with its own background color and markings.
After printing the main image, additional marks and elements were added with paint and both graphite and Primacolor pencils.

This group is part of an original series of 50 stone lithographs, created in the early 1980s in Portland, Oregon.

Studies in the Colors of Gray

These drawings are a continuation of my interest in contrasting many hours of realistic rendering against a rapidly drawn gesture. Concentrating on only black and white allows me to explore the fullest possible range of gray values, values that I think of as color without hue. The two rock drawings include an additional black square in which erasing or subtractive drawing is juxtaposed to the additive drawing technique of the rocks.