{"id":19531,"date":"2021-05-26T08:38:32","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T12:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=19531"},"modified":"2021-05-26T09:11:29","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T13:11:29","slug":"scott-prior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2021\/05\/26\/scott-prior\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Prior\u2019s Beatific New England"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn New England, we live in a world of changing seasons, which, I think, invites an almost sensual awareness of time and its effects. The New England landscape is small and intimate and directs our attention to things close at hand,\u201d painter Scott Prior<\/a> has written on his website.<\/p>\n

\u201cIlluminations,\u201d at the Cahoon Museum<\/a> in Cotuit, Massachusetts, from March 18 to May 29, 2021, offers a survey of more than 35 of his paintings and drawings. Here are still-lives glowing in front of windows; cabins in the Cape Cod dunes; an abandoned amusement park; his wife, Nanny, in a robe seated on their porch with their dog or standing in a garden; sunlight shining through beach towels hung outside on laundry lines; and people gathered around bonfires on Cape Cod beaches.<\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Bonfire on the Beach, Foggy Sunset,” 2021, oil on panel. (Courtesy of Quidley and Company, Nantuckett)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prior was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He studied art at UMass-Amherst, from which he graduated in 1971. He\u2019s lived in Northampton since 1971, in view of Mount Monadnock.<\/p>\n

During the summer of 1969, he\u2019s said, he quit a summer job washing dishes on Cape Cod, started selling his watercolors, hung on a fence in Provincetown\u2014and his future opened up before him.<\/p>\n

Technology as a contemporary religion was a theme of his early, allegorical paintings of machines, angels and bruised oligarchs. They were painted in an expressionist style inspired by the grotesque contemporary surrealism of painter Gregory Gillespie, an early mentor and friend, whom he met in 1973. Compositions evoked Dutch and Flemish renaissance altarpieces. Prior was also inspired by the obsessive detail of these artists. A Whitney Museum retrospective of paintings by Edward Hopper in 1980 was a lesson in how to convey the feelings of alienation and the \u201cemotional power of light.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Nanny and Rose,” 1983, oil on canvas. (Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Around the late 1970s and early 1980s, Prior arrived at the style that he’s pursued ever since then: realistic portrayals of his haunts in western Massachusetts and Cape Cod and views into his domestic life. These are quiet places, often witnessed alone\u2014\u201coff season,\u201d as he described it in a 2016 video by John Thornton<\/a>\u2014or intimate moments with perhaps one other person, a child, a lover. This work prompted observers to group him among the Pioneer Valley painters sometimes dubbed the “Valley Realists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior\u2019s paintings generally begin as photos\u2014which he combines digitally in Photoshop and in pencil sketches. He transfers the sketch\u2014these days viewed on his iPad\u2014to the painting board or linen with a grid. \u201cI start [painting] in the upper left hand corner and work to the lower right hand corner. And there\u2019s a very practical reason for that, which is that way I don\u2019t put my elbow in the painting,\u201d Prior told Thornton.<\/p>\n

Prior paints it all with a smooth, dreamy, hyperawareness of fleeting moments portrayed in crystalline detail, given the honeyed glow and poignant, bittersweet mood of a perfect summer evening. You might call it a beatific light.<\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Community Garden at Sunrise,” 2004, oil on canvas. (Collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI live in Eden, my life is very much Edenic, that\u2019s the way I see it,\u201d Prior said in a video for his 1999 deCordova Museum retrospective<\/a>. He\u2019s also described his project as \u201cdiscovering the spiritual in the everyday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior settled upon his style around the same time as he got married and became a father. \u201cMost of my paintings \u2026 are about my marriage and [three] children, a babysitter or two\u00a0 and the places we call home: our house, the backyard, Cape Cod, and western Massachusetts,\u201d Prior writes on his website.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re looking at a very particular moment,\u201d Prior said in the video for his 1999 deCordova retrospective, \u201clike a snapshot, but most snapshots don\u2019t do it for us, it\u2019s hopefully more than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Bedroom in Winter,” 1980, oil on canvas. (Courtesy Cahoon Museum of American Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “The Swimmer,” 2005, oil on panel. (Courtesy of Cahoon Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Couple on the Beach,” 2015, oil on panel. (Courtesy of Quidley and Company, Nantucket)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Cabin in the Dunes,” 2015, oil on canvas. (Courtesy of Cahoon Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Autumn Window,” 2019, oil on board. (Courtesy of Alpha Gallery, Boston)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Scott<\/a>
Scott Prior, “Sunrise on the Lake,” oil on canvas. (Collection of the Cahoon Museum of American Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn New England, we live in a world of changing seasons, which, I think, invites an almost sensual awareness of time and its effects. The New England landscape is small and intimate and directs our attention to things close at hand,\u201d painter Scott Prior has written on his website. \u201cIlluminations,\u201d at the Cahoon Museum in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[870,871,545,869],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19531"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19550,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19531\/revisions\/19550"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}