Scotty Peek lives in Columbia, SC and teaches Art at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School. Prior to joining the Heathwood faculty, Scotty was an Assistant Professor of Art at South Carolina State University, held positions from Preparator to Assistant Director at several South Carolina Museums and Galleries, and taught art courses part-time at the University of South Carolina and Midlands Technical College. He received his Master’s in Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina in 2000 and his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Austin Peay State University (TN) in 1995. Scotty was included in the 2004 Triennial at the South Carolina State Museum, was one of four artists selected for 701 Center for Contemporary Art’s inaugural 2008 exhibit, and was one of nine artists recently included in “En Plein Air: Scenes of SC” at the Columbia Museum of Art.
Scotty’s works can be found at Art & Light Gallery (Greenville SC), Shain Gallery (Charlotte NC), Spalding Nix Fine Art (Atlanta GA), Camellia Art (Hilton Head Island/Bluffton SC), and Sophiella Gallery (Mobile AL).
Besides making art and teaching art, there’s also family: two dogs, two daughters, and Sally, the handbag maker: nanabysally.com
Statement:
I paint and draw, mostly landscapes, often abstracted.
I appreciate the marks within a work of art, including the initial mistakes, accidents, and other struggles left visible even as parts of the representational image become more clarified. Though I start each painting from life or photos, I usually abandon the reference to focus on how the painting functions as a non-representational painting. I sometimes go back to the reference, re-finding and pulling forward parts of the realistic image, but may ultimately obscure them again, drawing the viewer's attention away from the image and back to the line. I aim to find a balance between representation and non-representation.
My interest in the landscape is partly in its ability to be simultaneously general and specific. A landscape can be indicative of a neighborhood, city, state, region, country, etc. It can represent the sentimental layout of a particular great-grandmother's lifelong backyard plantings, or it could be a random arrangement of plants as trees or birds may have dropped the seeds. The landscape can be the primary subject, but also the possible setting for another story. From a single spot in any location, there are thousands of potential landscape paintings. It's a subject that just doesn't seem to get exhausted.
