WHO WAS WILLIAM SCOTT?"...a sublime so familiar that each will be tempted to believe he would have discovered it easily himself, although few are capable of discovering it."

Francois Fénélon

ACT IBeginnings

William Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland on a timely date, February 15th, 1913. It was to be two days before the opening in New York of the Armory Show which ushered into the United States the new Modernism in contemporary art. The exhibition included works by Matisse, Duchamp and Picasso. Two British artists were represented, Augustus John and Walter Sickert and one Irishman, Jack Yeats.

Like his friend Dylan Thomas, William Scott was a Celt. He grewup in a small provincial town in Northern Ireland where his father, a sign writer, had moved when William was eleven years old. This ordinary market town was to inspire his work all his life. Where Thomas had his town park in Swansea, Wales, a world overflowing with adventure and possibility, Scott had his Enniskillen high street and a table full of magical objects.

I was brought up in a grey world, an austere world: the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture. The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best and the pictures which looked most like mine were painted on walls a thousand years ago.

Scott’s world, like that of the poet was a world of the child: caveman, warrior, king, sailor or farmer, a world where danger and adventure were ever present.. Here chance played a major role, and Scott was to grasp it with both hands. While Thomas took the Bible and ancient stories and twisted the words and stories into a new forms and ringing sounds, so Scott was to take images of the ordinary things around him , creating a

language of his own full of unexpected meanings and symbolic references .

I like having contact with farming people and they look very much at paintings as they might look at their own animals. I’ve found that they look for shapes and colours and they are perhaps sometimes bewildered at my paintings but they do actually use their eyes and I think this is really what I like about country people – they are, they are...they live by their eyes, by their vision.

But tragedy was soon to come. WS at the tender age of fourteen lost his father in a fire; the elder Scott was trying to save lives and fell to his death from a ladder.

After this tragedy, then aged fifteen, Scott left home to go to art school in Belfast and never really returned to his family. In 1931 after four years at Belfast School of Art, having won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in London, he finally left Ireland, travelling to London as a penniless student in search of the traditions of Cézanne and Matisse.

In some ways WS was on a mission struggling not only against terrific odds of a material nature, but also against an ingrainedconservatism and academicism that prevailed in England and which was not to change until the early sixties.

Completing studies at the Royal Academy, he travelled with his new wife, Mary, to Italy and France, but once again fate was to intervene; war broke out, and with Mary pregnant, the couple returned to England. For five long years WS served in the British army, and isolated from the continent, his career as a painter almost came to an end. After the war, he travelled back to France and Italy to attempt to reconnect with his pre-war life, but the continent was no longer the same and now he had a family too. So the Scotts stayed in England to take up their lives as artists once more.

Caught between the catastrophes of two devastating world wars andthe premature death of his own father, I believe WS found in art some kind of healing and stability. Much as the Egyptians created

mummies to preserve their kings and pyramids to defeat death itself, WS needed to shut out his own feelings of impermanence and loss by creating symbolic forms. What he was looking for, however was not abstract; nor was it a photographic representation. Ironically he was searching for a new realism wherethe artist could place himself firmly in his own time.

A painter saw in candlelightthat bottle on the chequered clotha knife,a fork,a plate,combined with shadowsand the light.

The common thingsthat lie on table tops,

live again as Painters props.1

Then in 1953, just forty years old, the offer of a teaching job took Scott to Canada and then US for the first time. In New Yorkhe met his American counterparts in the Modern movement, Pollock,De Kooning, Kline and Rothko. I remember very clearly the excitement that he had on his return to England and his descriptions of all these artists that he hung out with in the Cedar Tavern in NY. Although he found little in common with Pollock, he was drawn to Rothko. Oddly enough, they discovered that it was the English artist, JMW Turner, for whom they both shared a common passion.

Six years later, Mark Rothko, with his wife, Mel, and his young daughter Kate, visited our family in the cottage in Somerset. Despite their aesthetic kinship and love of Turner, I see the friendship with Rothko more like fellow tortured souls confronting their oppression, than one where individual painting styles mirrored one another. Both artists were at this time 1 From the poem Towards Chardin by William Scott (unpublished).

QuickTime™ and a decompressorare needed to see this picture.

dealing with public commissions, Rothko with the Seagram murals for the Four Seasons restaurant and Scott with his forty foot mural for the Altnagelvin hospital in Northern Ireland. As a witness to those conversations over the dinner table in 1959, I remember Rothko talking at length about leaving Russia as a boy and coming to the US, about oppression of the Jews, but hardly a word about creating murals or tendencies in modern art. As Rothko had changed his name from Rothkowitz, so WS eliminated most of the Scotts and Irish from his accent.2 With ease he couldslip into a BBC voice when interviewed or speaking in public. Andit was this concern about elitism and racism that led Rothko, on his return from Europe, to refuse to allow his murals to be installed in the Four Seasons Restaurant; he wrote a letter to Scott sharing his thoughts on this, wondering where the ideal place would be to show their work.

William Scott was not a 'feel good' kind of person. There was a critical edge in his interactions which took place with a kind ofknowing twinkle in his clear blue eyes. His humour was of the dry Scottish/Irish variety. There was almost a pride and satisfaction in NOT being understood--in no way was he going to make concessions. He enjoyed the confusion he could cause in theviewer when they were faced with a new twist or turn in his painting. It was as though the mystery and ambiguity that surrounded his work was, for him, a necessary part of the process.

WS was himself a very private person, even unknown to his closestfriends and family; in some ways he was a prisoner, alone on a separate journey. And the stone walls that he loved so dearly could have been constructions to keep out the stranger’s prying eye. He often referred to the ‘secret’ in the painting, something private that could not be mentioned.

The line that leads the eye to other parts2 This may also have been the influence of Dylan Thomas who had managed to eliminate all traces of Welshness from his ‘cut glass accent’ (The Life of /Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon, JM/Dent 1965)./

Is sometimes blurred, where two forms Meet divide the forms and let the Space be seen.

A girl in Egypt stretched her arm like youAnd waited for five thousand years, Growing no older as time passed by.

Let me incise that line again and youBecome that Cairo girl, being todayas she was then.3

As his friend Terence Flanagan said of him: ‘Throughout his life, Williamperfected his drawing: Everything he did evolved out of it and I held him to be one of the most singular draughtsmen of his time. He drew to find his subject and to find himself. Rather like that concept which Seamus Heaney has of the poet rhyming ‘to set the darkness echoing.’4 Again, it reminds me of Dylan Thomas, where thelanguage of past and present was reinvented to embrace a whole new freedom of sound and space.

ACT IIThe Journey

Why Cezanne, why Matisse? What was the Japanese Tea Ceremony? The Orchard of Pears, the Poem for a Jug or the significance of Pythagoras?

These are questions that we are left with. In many ways the career of William Scott has been dealt with as a seamless journeyfrom figuration, through abstraction, taking in on its way the new post war American painting, and then tracking back again to asymbolic realism.

3 From the poem “The girl who was and is” by William Scott (William Scott: drawings edited by Lou Klepac. Published David Anderson, New York, 1975.4 From an address made by Terence Flanagan at Scott’s funeral inEnniskillen, 1990.

But this is to look at his work in the sterile light of academic formalism, much akin to the nineteenth century academicism that WS, the Modernist, so rebelled against when he arrived at the Royal Academy in London. But the furious debates that then took place about abstraction and realism are now a thing of the past, replaced by what Jed Perl refers to as ‘Laissez-Faire Aesthetics’.5 As though anything goes now in the art world.

To look at a painting by WS we pass out of the real world into a fantasyworld. But this is no Alice in Wonderland world of surreal illusion, no upside-down world of hatters or hares. Rather, it isa world of sensual pleasure where it is only the presence of a scratched line, an horizon, a tabletop, that anchors our floatinggaze.

Having slipped into a dream, it is the material reality of texture, the scraping of the surface, the thin transparent glaze,the scuffed white, the incision of a knife that tells us that thehand of an artist is at work, taking us on a journey, pointing usin a direction. Ingrid Bergman said of Scott’s work to Patrick Heron at a dinner in Rome in April, 1953, the line is full of a ‘positively animal vitality’.6

This journey that Scott takes us on is one where sacrifice is theprecursor, or perhaps the very price of the ticket itself. We are transported to a country where language must be relearned in order to find our way. As we look for the normal signposts, we feel a certain panic. There are no labels to conveniently tell us: this is a woman or a pot on a table,a fish or a pear. We are on our own. And literally this is where the freedom to interpretenters in. Nothing is lost in translation.

The visual and conceptual crutches that we habitually depend uponto interpret a painting have to be dropped by the wayside. Contrary to our wish for clear explanations; frustrating our attempt to see a consistent line of development from familiar 5 Jed Perl in The Baffler, June, 2012.6 William Scott by Norbert Lynton, Thames & Hudson, 2004

forms moving towards abstraction or distilling a symbol from the natural world, or playing with ambiguous readings of figure/landscape/still life, Scott insists that all such rationalexplanations only block our understanding of the work---and further---that intellectual interpretation can only nullify the experience.

I do not like long term plans for my painting. I feel constricted if I get too bound up with commitments, I try to avoid discussing work that has not yet been made. I have also a fear that through talking too much one can so easily appear pompous.

It is indeed a journey where discovery of that 'magic' Scott so often referred to, is actually a stripping away of the mask of false realism. So Scott's paintings carry us into the unfamiliarterritory that lies beyond the clutter of the millions of visual images bombarding our consciousness every second of the day. He searches for the soulfulness that inhabits the quiet suffering behind the mundane ritual of daily life. He opens up the ordinary, be it eggs or frying pans, to new possibilities. It isa form or rebirth. As in Joyce’s epiphanies, Scott offers us an affirmation of our own act of seeing, a true heroism.

ACT IIIMeaning

The symbols used by Scott provide an immediacy in the work. Safe havens in a place of potential and overwhelming threat. The farmer or the sailor, as he scans the sky, sees signs or omens ofthe coming storm and senses danger through the use of his eyes, just as the hunter searches for his prey looking for trails or the child finds its mother’s breast in the softness of her touch.These are primarily visual and sensual experiences; connections to touch and sight. In a world full of electronic information, bereft of direct sensation, they suggest alternative behaviours or strategies; solutions beyond the stalemate of conventional thinking. Perhaps this is why Scott felt comfortable out in the country communicating directly with the people that he met there.He also admired the innocent enthusiasm and spontaneity of children and studied their art endlessly. It was almost an

escape from the pseudo-sophistication of the city, and of the artworld itself.

I find there are times when the scribble, if it has been made spontaneously, can be for me the starting point of a more developed drawing. I collect many of my own scribbles and re-look at them in the way that many other artists find their source material in popular photography or nature scrap-books and period postcards. Pavement graffiti by children and the hieroglyphics incised on stone by the ancientsare constantly in my mind. The relationship of children to early man and their significance to myself is important. I also find it important to keep around me some of the objects that were the subject of my early paintings…as time passes theychange and offer me a renewal.

In some ways WS was a harsh teacher. Like a Zen Buddhist monk, he was not going to allow any short cuts; at the same time enlightenment could be only a stone's throw away. A misstep could lead a person to stumble into a gaping ditch. True simplicity was the hardest goal--and the greatest satisfaction. WS often said that painting was the most difficult art to understand. Unlike music, which he considered a lesser art, there was no immediate emotional payoff. In a painting, the spectator does not always leave the work with a feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction—as in the theatre where all is neatly resolved in the third act! Part of the process is to move out of the comfort zone of our preconceptions. Unlike a time-based medium, painting holds no immediate resolution. No ‘That’s all Folks’. To understand the visual work, the viewer must launch himself into it, bringing his own connections from private thoughts. Herein lies the real satisfaction. Each work is part of an individual journey, ongoing, leading from one experience to another, to be repeated, reconfigured endlessly in the light of the everyday as well as the divine.

ACT IVLooking

To come to a painting by William Scott without a context of art history from cave painting to Jasper Johns, can possibly reduce the richness of the experience. In this sense the story in the painting is art itself. On the other hand as Graham Greene

talked of writing, the words had to stay in the background. Thusit is the sparseness of Scott’s work that like a Bach fugue insists on an extraordinary precision and control.

Behind the façade of pots and pans there is another image, a private one and ambiguous which can be sensed rather than seen.

Let us look at the first known still life of 1928.

This could almost be an academic old master rendering of objects on a table. But look again and you will see that even in this quite formal approach there is a panache, a rough confidence in the treatment of shadow and light. The deftness of the strokes hints at a determination not to fall into the trap of academicism. Clearly Cézanne is hard at work in this fifteen-year-old mind as he contemplates a bottle and some fruit on a table.

For many people, to look at a painting by WS entails much hard work. Unlike Bacon or even Rothko, it is not going to be an experience of a tormented soul expressing pain (Bacon), nor is itgoing to be a spiritual experience of tragedy and heroism (Rothko). A painting by William Scott might be seen by some as a most unremarkable experience of the mundane. What could be more boring than to look at a simple dinner plate, or cup, or fork on a sparse tabletop?

Earlier this year, pupils at the Model School in Enniskillen, theschool where William went as a boy, when looking at his work as part of a school project, said that they saw rocks, or sunglasses, containers or even pineapples. In a sense, Scott's draining away of obvious references is a prerequisite to understanding his painting. The boredom that might lead the mind to wander in effect leads to a semi-dream state where all kinds of shapes, colors and forms take on meaning well beyond their immediate and ordinary references. That his paintings could be relevant to ten-year-old school children in 2013, one hundred years after his birth, gives a small clue to the timelessness of his art.

When I look at a painting by my father, be it an early or late landscape, figure, or still life, what catches my attention most of all is the sense of design. Learned from his father, the decorator and sign writer, this skill in organizing space and creating attractive surfaces came intuitively to him. It seems to be a part of the Celtic tradition going right back to the Bookof Kells where the graphic sense of words is extraordinary. And all the shop fronts and pubs and small stores in Ireland show this unique tradition of design. For Scott that Enniskilen high street left a lasting impression that combined with the hereticalideas on modern art of his teacher, Miss Bridle. must have produced in the young boy, a potent brew.

But in some strange way, it is this same sense of design that operates, not as an invitation to look closer, but almost as a wall, or barrier which actually says, ”Hey, stay where you are! Forbidden to come closer! “ It seems like a simple formal arrangement that has no other end but to satisfy our aesthetic senses.

My concern, a concern of nearly every other painter related to me in the past, is the ‘edge’. The edge is of absolutely major importance to me – that it should be right. This is related of course to my division of space, my painting of edge.

There are two kinds of energy at work here. And the danger lies in the moment of contact that in electricity produces the short

circuit., The act of looking at a painting by William Scott can be a similarly dangerous process, and for many people does lead to a sort of immediate shut down: 'It's not for me. This is not art.'

But here the battle is a quiet one, waged alone. A painting by Scott does not lack drama, narrative or conflict. The heroes are that same cast of characters, those forerunners of Modernism...ancient hunters, tribal elders, magicians, priests, healers, and the battles are the same: to sustain life and to defeat death. The weapons are not swords and arrows, but simple kitchen untensils. Yet on one level it brings to mind those Fenian women beating on dusbin lids to warn of the approach of the British.

ACT VConclusion

It is this deep approach to art that takes a painting away from being merely an exquisite object of consumption, framed and immaculate on a white wall in a prestigious art gallery or museum. It becomes something much greater--a necessary and functioning part of everyday life.

It is this depth that puts Scott’s work on a very human scale. The painting moves beyond being an aesthetic object with a market value to take on a living purpose. In the Twentieth Century, where human barbarism rose to historic levels, the artist could actually function as part of a civilizing process. As EM Forstersaid, 'only connect'7

Hitler’s Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union can attest to this beyond all else in human history. The burning of the books in Berlin in 1933 and the proscribing of abstract art in the Soviet Union was a full-blooded fear of culture and freedom of expression- despite Goering's predilection for a tasty Renoir or Rubens. It was into this world of strife that William Scott 7 The epigraph to his 1910 novel Howard’s End.

embarked on his career, and where he honed his skill as a as a painter of pots and pans.

The museums of St Ives, Wakefield and Belfast, as well as Bath, Hastings and Enniskillen have gone against this commercial tide to present William Scott to a generation almost completely unaware of his work. I hope that the Centenary exhibitions will throw a new light on William Scott’s practice, and open deeper and more general questions as to the function of the artist in our time. In today’s world, where Museums dominated by market forces, have abandoned the role of searching out and preserving the genuine art of their time, this is an immensely commendable endeavour. As Aidan Dunne said in the Irish Times: “there’s a solidity to his achievement…(that) comes through clearly and will surely endure…his role in alternative historical narratives, that is to say in Irish, Scottish and European contexts , is likely to prove significant in the long term, rather than restoring him to prominence in a London-centric pantheon.8

Art that speaks over and above today’s commodified models must function to humanize and liberate the world. As some of the pupils at the Model School in Enniskillen said about their experience of looking at the paintings of William Scott, the workgave them a great sense of freedom: all things could become possible.

In an interview with Scott in the early sixties, Mervyn Levy, hisold room mate who was a childhood friend of Dylan Thomas, wrote: Today he lives and works only a few steps from that house where we dwelt in the thirties, and where, his roots as a painter were laid. 'We haven't travelled very far after all, have we, Levy?’ he (WS) said, his face crackling into a network of crinkling smiles. It was a good point. All journeys are an illusion. One is always in the same place. The place of roots...9

8 Aidan Dunne – Irish Times (Weekend) – Saturday, 89th March, 20139 Mervyn Levy – William Scott’s Circle and Square – The PerennialTheme - Artist at Work – The Studio, 1963