Faith Scott Jessup Statement November 2020

My paintings are equal parts invention and description.  While the work has a high degree of verisimilitude, realism is not the point.  Rather, detailed description is a by-product of sustained observation and contemplation. 

I find and collect small, often overlooked objects during my daily walks.  Sometimes these items—stones, leaves, shells, twigs-- intimately observed, will converse with reimagined landscapes.  At times, favorite stones or other things that have hovered around the edges of my life for years will be rediscovered and painted anew, given the fresh perspective of a new place. I have begun to re-contextualize my familiar objects and envision them floating with an improbable weightlessness in invented skies.

In this body of work, I imagine the natural world existing apart from our human preoccupations, arranging and rearranging itself, rising, falling, defying gravity at will.  I find solace in the constancy of natural life forces that will endure, adapt and change in spite of our self-inflicted wounds.  For myself, it’s about balance: to keep ones eye on the magic unfolding in the peeling bark on a tree or a glistening stone on a seashore, while looking heavenward at  Camus’ “benign indifference of the universe.”  And so, as always, I remind myself to pick up my brush and be quiet.  Listen, touch, pay attention.

Growing up with an artist parent, Scott’s creative nature was nourished from a young age. Art classes started at five years of age, and included private tutoring in watercolors and oils by middle school. Art studies in high school morphed into design studies in college, then morphed back into a painting practice in early adulthood.

“I’ve been a painter all my life”, said Simons, “To me, being an artist is all about how you see the world, not necessarily what you make or create. I’ve painted a thousand paintings in my mind when I wasn’t in the studio, and I think most artists are this way. It’s how you think and view the world around you, not necessarily what you create.”

Scott paints profusely and shows at multiple galleries. “Even when I’m frustrated with the work or the process, I’m still so much happier when I’m painting that I have to do it. And it’s physical for me, so I feel better overall. I have to keep making them.”

Scott has served on the Development Committee for The Contemporary in Austin, the Board of Trustees for Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA), the Board of Directors for Artreach Dallas, and the Board of Directors for EASL, the Emergency Artist Support League.

Scott lives in Austin and Blanco, Texas.  

General artistic concerns:   (First Principle – Conceptual Pictures)

At the core of my painting methodology is a commitment to the tradition and history of painting, to understanding the historical dialogue between surface and illusion, the pictorial and the plastic, subject and object.  For over two decades I have been investigating, in general, the issue of the mediated representation and, specifically, the problematic relationship between the image and its referent.

In my work, painting subjects (e.g. still-life, landscape, etc.) becomes ‘convention ready-mades’, a foil by which to explore the relationship between neutral image and active concept.  Often with irony and humor, I hope to encourage the viewer to recognize the inherent slippage—the subject depicted as subject, and the painting as an artistic conceit as content.  “In our new reality, there is always a picture behind the picture.” (J. Baudrillard) 

The new body of idiosyncratic images called “Semblances” are a continuation of ideas explored in previous bodies of work (multiples, clones, copies).  In this age of virtual and augmented reality, clones, and deep fakes, how do we know what is actually true?  It is called Reality T.V. but it was never real to begin with, only invented for the influencer to create more influencers, creating through diminished copies a semblance of reality. Do we believe the doppelganger looks like us, or that we look like it? By contrasting a subject with its semblance we expose all of the metaphysical contradictions of the simulacra. Does the image of a naturalistic squirrel or bird become even more naturalistic in relation to its kitch semblance, or do they reveal that their artifice is equal in its representation? The fidelity of these images calls attention to the complexity of appearances and their capacity, simultaneously, to confirm and dispute what we know to be true.  The more we see, the more we learn, the less we know.  As a result, a contradictory visual/conceptual cycle emerges.  These paintings playfully expose the fact that all images contain the ability to be, simultaneously, both true and false.

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth.  It is the truth which conceals there is none.  The simulacrum is true.”  (Jean Baudrillard, “The Precssion of Simulacra, Ecclesiastes)

A copy (painting) is a copy (semblance) that becomes the truth.