Scott L. Dickson
Artist Statement 2021- Present
My work is born from the chaotic yet inspiring moments of parenting, early-morning mood swings, syrup-sticky hands, and starry-eyed toothless grins. These experiences fuel my exploration of the tension between the exuberance of childhood and the ever-increasing expectation of adulthood.
In engaging with a variety of processes and materials, I channel my children’s unfiltered energy through vibrant, geometric forms and abstracted figures. The candy-colored shapes pulses with youthful excitement, while grid-like patterns and hard-edged lines introduce structure, reflecting my attempt to balance creativity and routine.
In a world that increasingly values productivity over play, I believe the importance of creativity and imagination has never been more crucial. Play fosters exploration, resilience, and emotional depth, while creativity sparks innovation and personal growth. My work celebrates the freedom of play and the boundaries that shape it, reflecting the ongoing dialogue between spontaneity and structure, childhood and adulthood.
Scott L Dickson
Artist Statement 2017-2020
The elusive refuge of ambiguity, its privileges of questions and obscurities, is central to my life and in turn, the images that I make. To exist is to be governed by dualities; I live within the confines of a two-sided reality, something is or is not. But there is a seductive tension in the alternative, in straddling a boundary, crossing back and forth, a desire for nothing to ever truly have an answer or end. This is my respite. Fleeing from the controlled simplification of assurances to the wickedly tempting uncertainties of ambiguity is an act of greed. I am greedy. Curiosity made me this way.
Demanded by untold necessity I drift into daydreams, continuously returning to quasi-realities of secluded interactions with the natural world. Each time I am lead by invisible force (or fate) to barriers that present themselves as warnings, yields between two states, facticity and possibility. One such vision is a buzzing summer field with no start that ends at a wall of tree and scrub, giving no hint as to what is beyond. “Don’t dare pass through” I’m whispered, “don’t dare wonder”. I desire what I am not privy to and fight the lure of comfort in what I am. I am often successful. My greed wills me to pursue, crossing the threshold to behold the mystery. But each time in a twisted act of conformity I find my imaginings are responded to with answers that seem obvious. My spirit is rendered level. While unsatisfied, I am fulfilled with the knowledge that this state functions as a loop, one that I will undoubtedly return to.
In working through images, stepping into them, pulling back, adding, and subtracting, I wrestle with achieving even the slightest resemblance of their origins. In truth, I most likely could never want them to. They end in fractures of place, somewhere not before, nor later, but also not now. They traverse a space that is much harder to define. Their ambiguous readings only offer me a chance to sit in the middle for a while longer, to linger with pleasure before spilling back over to a side of undesired settling.
Artist Statement 2013-2016
Time pause.
I want a moment to last a lifetime. I want that moment to have its own life, changing and evolving over the course of its existence.
It is in moments that I can begin to understand my place in the world. I have found these moments in my natural surroundings, the neighboring forests, expansive fields, and quiet waterways that call me wherever I am.
Through a method of work that hybridizes aspects of drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking, echoes and reverberations of these moments are resurrected just as abstract as their origins. With a process of repetition and precision, the work allows for the contemplation of specific passages of time, their meaning and significance.
The final images pursue moments that I find most peace and reason in, the ability to
Pause Time.