Scott Prior has painted a pleasant baby blue cottage overlooking a delicate and pastel dawn skyline rising gently over the New England coastline, gazing over the hedge of an unkempt garden at the cookie-shingled house. Somehow, with the skill and sensitive eye of a master, he has found the virtuoso balance of the contrast between the chromatic cadmium orange glow in the bedroom window and the gloaming tonalism of the rising light.
Window on the Ocean, 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 40". Courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, MA.
Despite the shadows and desaturation of early morning, somehow Prior finds cheerful color, and the vibrant and sensual plot has a vigor and spirit of peace and place. He manages to shape a mood that feels as though someone really cared for these plants, and carefully tended this flowering little piece of homely pleasure but let it run to seed as time slowed down. There is a lovely, unconventional oddness about it and many of his compositions—an innocent sort of alienation, as if everyone on earth was suddenly whisked away and nobody remembered to turn off the lights. This is Prior’s Blue House, Early Morning.
The painting is set during the liminal light and magical moment before the world wakes. Prior enjoys telling the stories of his paintings. In a gentle voice he explains, “Clearly there are people, but they’re not there. Someone told me the paintings look like the landscape just after the atom bomb exploded. These remnants of civilization in a landscape always fascinated me. I remember discovering that aspect of Edward Hopper’s paintings—the presence of people and a kind of melancholy, an awareness of absence.” But if this is an apocalypse, it’s a beautiful, charming ending for civilization, for this would be a peaceful and pleasant place to sit out the tumult of the rapture, and if the reaper came calling here, he would be offered a nice cup of chamomile and a comfortable seat with a view over the water.
Blue House, Early Morning, 2023, oil on panel, 24 x16". Courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, MA.
His paintings do not reflect reality. Prior creates composites, using photographs and Photoshop to create a concentrated reinvention of New England, making his paintings more real than the real thing by selecting the objects he needs to create the mood of the place. He distills the essence of a feeling.
His Cabin with Towels feels precarious, positioned on the edge of a cliff. Like Blue House, Early Morning, there is evidence of life, but nobody is present. There is something of the mystery and magic light of Nighthawks here, but where Hopper’s empty spaces and solitary people radiate the loneliness of modern life and the alienation of the city, Prior’s golden light glowing from the window suggests the safety of being at home, wrapped in warmth and wool blankets, and the coziness of hot cocoa. His hanging towels suggest that the story of the people inside the house is one of pleasant and modest comfort. And yet the house is hanging on the edge, and the mood is fragile and easily destroyed.
Chairs in Winter, 2022, oil on panel, 10 x 9". Courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, MA.
There is a touch of humor in the hot dog shack in his new Hot Dogs on the Beach, Off Season, which tells the sleepy story of the tired mood and nostalgia of seaside resort towns. It’s the magic hour over the shabby sausage stand, and even the person selling the dogs has gone home. With Pop Art touches like this blending with the icons of everyday life at the oceanside, Prior skirts the kitsch sensibilities of tourist trap galleries where a million paintings of boats and beaches and buoys evoke nostalgia for a vacation by the sea.
“I’m very cognizant about not doing that,” he says, “A lot of my work is instinctive now. A lot of people wouldn’t paint tire tracks. I do make decisions. I’m critical. I look at contemporary art and I’m hard to please. I’m always trying to separate myself out.” In his paintings the tourists have gone home, the holidays have ended; the carousel mood of summer has quickly wound down as fall brings golden leaves and bare branches. “That’s a big part of seasons in New England,” says Prior, “they happen so fast. It’s spring but my memory of a couple of feet of snow on the ground is just like yesterday. Before you know it, everything will be dying and it will be winter again…I love reading history, and for me a plot of land is like a history, especially in New England. I think about that a lot.”
Hot Dogs on the Beach, Off Season, 2023, 18 x12". Courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, MA.
Like the quickly changing seasons, the quiet histories of the small plots of land Prior paints are soon lost behind the veil of time, and the empty spaces of his compositions are reminders of the people who once inhabited these idealized places, these lost moments of America’s small stories. The composite spaces he creates are designed to enhance the mood of departure. In Chairs in Winter he added empty loungers to the scene of snow and ice set in a nearby community garden where allotments are frozen under white snow. The abandoned chairs are cold reminders of the summer past, and Prior has set the scene under a sky of backlit mist. The sublime and smoky sky fills this small and simple place shaped by the gentle pleasures of honest gardeners with frozen mystery. The chairs appear in several of his recent paintings as recurrent memories of the absent people who once lived in this landscape, impressively in his large Lake at Twilight.
Cabin with Towels, oil on canvas, 24 x 24". Courtesy William Baczek Fine Arts, Northampton, MA.
When people do appear in his recent paintings, they are distant, even when the situation is joyful. In Balloon Race the crowded watchers are turned away from us and their attention is focused on the joyful hot air balloons, full of bright color as they rise away from them, leaving them full of yearning. “Caspar David Friedrich is a big influence on me,” Prior shares. “The interaction of people in the landscape standing with their backs to you.” The debt to Friedrich is clear in other paintings, too, obviously in the mists of Chairs in Winter, and in the pretty but vacant Early Xmas Lights in the Park, in which the vibrant season and display glows for an empty audience.
Balloon Race, 2016, oil on panel, 18 x 18”
For decades Prior has painted backlit flowers in bright glass bottles set against wood-framed windows, and these have been steady sellers, combining a beachy sense of sunshine and the idle pleasure of collecting sea-glass with a spirituality born of religious stained windows. Prior says, “It’s about light. I remember seeing a retrospective of Hopper’s paintings, and it dawned on me that his subject is light. This is a very pointed investigation of light. There’s that very specific biblical phrase, ‘Let there be light.’ It’s the creation. It’s light! I spend a lot of time composing them, moving bottles around, looking through dozens of photographs of the scene, but every one’s different and there are different times of the day.” Prior enjoys the fact that these intimate paintings are as carefully arranged and idealized as his landscapes. “This isn’t set up on the Cape, on the bay, on the ocean—this is set up in my kitchen. I found that window with the mullions in an antique store, so it’s portable. I can move it around and set it up in a window anywhere. That’s the beauty of art making.” He likes to include toys in the arrangements, as a reminder of his children, who are now middle-aged. Mr. Potato Head is the latest to appear in his moveable window.
Early Xmas Lights in the Park, 2016, oil on panel, 8½ x 8”
Perhaps Prior’s wry sense of humor can be explained by his family. His father-in-law was Kurt Vonnegut, whose daughter Nanette is the mother of his three children. “He was the funniest man I ever knew,” Prior recalls. “I knew his books before I knew him. I was roommates with one of his sons in college—that’s how I met Nanny. In some ways his writing is so universal, some people say it’s simplistic, but there’s something so profound about simple knowledge. In the house on the Cape where he did all his writing he’d paint admonishments on the wall. He’d say things like ‘You’ve got to be kind, Goddammit!’ That’s the way he was. Simple knowledge with a twist. He was a wonderful gift to us.” Soon, Prior will be a grandparent, and he’s looking forward to the pleasures of that new role. So it goes… —
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Michael Pearce is a dynamic writer, curator, critic and author of Kitsch, Propaganda, and the American Avant-Garde. He is Professor of Art at California Lutheran University.
Scott Prior: New and Recent Paintings
When: August 2-September 2, 2023
Where: William Baczek Fine Art, 36 Main Street, Northampton, MA 01060
Information: (413) 587-9880, www.wbfinearts.com
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