Contact: mikaylascout@gmail.com
Follow: @scoutcurtin


Scout Curtin is a Boston, MA, and Brooklyn, NY based painter.

”I think of my paintings as love letters to practice, to the history of painting, to individual objects, and occasionally to people, places, or moments. I use images as opportunities to organize space, creating pictures that are psychological, intimate, and anachronistic. My process is about reactivity, construction, and presence, allowing a slow reveal of the image and desire for painting to operate as a barometer for my internal world and the content I consume. I’m interested in rectifying the painting's inner logic - constructing and deconstructing the image, destabilizing the viewer, using mark making, vibrational color, pattern, and line as tools for building an internal visual language. It's an approach of wiping and drawing, erasing, covering, drawing again, coloring, waiting, deciding, wiping. 

The finished pieces are muted paintings of domestic images, made to a scale roughly resembling that of my body. I see the subject as the formal elements of painting and my relationship to the medium, as much as the emotional landscape suggested by the picture and its linguistic implications. The images I work with are drawn from art history, memory (as recollection of perception, not identity building or narrative) and close looking at the world around me. I’m seeking out images that can facilitate the visual language I’m building, and in that way allowing the practice of painting to guide the pictorial content of my work. The meaning of these images is flexible, constantly shifting from sweet recollection to complicated interior, mirroring the movement in the painting’s surface created by ambient washes and irregular patterns. These elements together create a practice of call and response - drawing an image, making a move, looking, responding - in which the goal of the painting is resolution within the edges of the canvas.”