Opening of the exhibition Still Dancing by Scott Plear

Bits and Bobs

Painting—like poetry, literature, architecture, dance, music, and other forms of expression—is about joining the various elemental qualities of the art form in the best combination to create an emotion. In painting, those qualities or elements are colour, value, shape, space, scale, and texture: the bits and bobs that make up a piece of art.

If you get it right, it is like discovering the combination to a safe. With the right sequence, the safe will open, revealing its contents. Getting it right in painting will release in the viewer the feelings and therefore the magic of painting—its content. This experience can be repeated visit after visit. Some art requires only one look and offers little more upon a return to view. A great piece of art will renew and refresh constantly. To create such a work is rare.

Ideas will come and go. Visual forms include illustration (i.e. pictorial storytelling) and, say, computer graphics. These are not the forms my paintings encompass. Eliminating them from your thoughts will let you get closer to the core of my work. This is not simple and requires the practice of looking. The experience of seeing needs to be cultivated. Painting, like all art forms, needs to be cultivated.

Be challenged.

– Scott Plear