Artist Statement
I am inspired by figurative exploration through deliberate archetypal retrospective styles and the evolution of abstracted and literal representation of the human form. I search for essential idealized forms and relationships, obscuring invention and observation using nature as a guide while working independently from it.
I work with a hunger for place, and incessant yearning for historic communion with the past. I see distant ideals and relationships within the context of art history. I invoke spiritual archetypes of an indeterminate era as guides, searching for recognition in the invention of a visual language that draws deeply from a well of shared mythologies, while also honing a precise and individual visual regulatory framework, following a personal evolution of line and color. I am displaying my longing for the richness of a shared history and rites I may not understand, but that strike notes of familiarity. I don’t want to disappear, so my aim is to find as many points of contact within the miasma of a shared visual language as I can to anchor my thoughts. Moving through a world of uncertain outcomes, my view relative to art history and the figures of ancestral knowledge, are a bulwark and a fortress. I am creating works that speak to each other, wrapping the viewer in a gauze of memory.
Pierce Scantlin 2025