Gallery 1261 | 12/10-12/30 | Denver, CO

Messengers of Beauty

In a solo show at Gallery 1261, Scott Conary presents new oil paintings featuring the often colorful subject matter for which he’s best known

In a solo show at Gallery 1261, artist Scott Conary of Portland, Oregon, presents approximately 20 new oil paintings featuring the often colorful subject matter for which he’s best known—broken eggs, flowers, houses and drapery. “This collection of work is an evolution and expansion of what I’ve been exploring and celebrating in paint for a number of years now,” he explains. “These are paintings of subjects that we don’t necessarily recognize as things of beauty or as messengers of stories.”Bound, oil on panel, 30 x 36"

Whether we identify these everyday objects as beautiful or not, Conary certainly has a knack for illuminating their splendor, working in a process of almost aggressive revision that satisfies a particular standard. “Paintings are built up and torn down and built up again, until they reach a state where the subject is—to use the word again—celebrated,” he says. “It’s almost kind of veneration. I often don’t know exactly how I’m going to achieve what it is I want in any given painting, but I know what attitude, what qualities, I want the painting to have. It’s a process of investigation, of trying to capture the magic of the visual qualities of the subject as well as its presence and meaning.”Beneath, oil on panel, 30 x 30"

Pictured here are several paintings that illustrate Conary’s fascination and skill in depicting drapery. For pieces like Bound and Beneath, we see elaborate arrangements of sheets, blankets, canvases and tarps—exemplifying the simple beauty of shadow and form. “Two different inspirations thread through the drapery pieces,” Conary notes. “First, and less obvious, when our child spent significant time in the hospital in her early years—and she will spend more time there in the future—the coarse hospital linens were supplemented by blankets and quilts, some hand-stitched, from donors and volunteers. As alarms chimed, nurses hustled, and parents fretted, they were warm doses of gentle and unexpected kindness in the midst of the stress, worry and medical clutter of the hospital.”Square Peg, oil on panel, 7 x 6½"

He continues, “In contrast, but not wholly separate, there are the fabrics we see in our urban environment. These are the tarps, tents and most anything else used to create improvised shelters by individuals living difficult lives on the margins. Their colors and shapes standing out amongst the greenery of Portland and the architecture of a city. Even as they are banners of distress, there’s a beauty in their folds in the sunlight. I don’t know how to reconcile all of this, and so I paint them. In the process they, at their best, become something else.”Cloth, oil on panel, 30 x 30"For Conary’s classic broken egg paintings, as seen in the show piece Square Peg, he shares that his attraction started as a simple exercise that art students are often tasked with. “They became something else when I gently cracked one, and saw the similarities between that seam running down the side of the shell and the scars running down my daughter’s chest,” he says. “They are deceptive things, eggs. Seemingly so simple—just as those students trying to paint their first one—they are demanding in their precision and remarkably beautiful; the glint of light on the albumen, the perfect shape and surprising color of a yolk, the contrast with the crisp shell. Cracked, broken and failing, their treasure spilling forth, they are all the more so.”