SPREAD / Painting Show at Messhugah, St. Louis, Missouri  (2003)

Virus / After Coreggio’s Jupiter & Io

Fingers / After De Ribera’s Jacob Deceives Isaac

Legs/ After Courbet’s Origin of the World

Fire / After Froment’s Burning Bush

Rumor / After Durer’s Joseph in Egypt

Panic/ After Bosch’s Extraction of the Stone of Madness

Terror/ After Reni’s Massacre of Innocents

All works: Oil on panel, 2′X2′

From the catalogue:

Spread is a seam that leaks. Pores, edges. Can’t put my finger on, can’t fit my hand around; enlarge, extend, disperse.  Spread is mouthful liquid dribbles down chin and stray wisp spoke that fans then dances corkscrew caught by light.   Broadcast, expand, diverge, feast, publish, sweep.  Spread out.  Unleash, unfurl, add fuel to – nothing stays where it is.  Stretch, thrust, sprout, gather, wax, mount, swell.  Spread: the word ate at me and was embodied in the branches I live with, in the woods on the bluff, arm-wide branches that reach to the sky at dusk just before their bark is too shadowed in black to see. I wait for that moment and paint then. Twilight reduces forms to flickering: see spirit instead of shell. Disseminate. Scatter. Steal.

In time, the word found home in bits of art history that became laden with links to current news.  Past and present plots entwine, personal and public narratives merge. Spread fingers legs, spread rumor-panic-virus-terror. Spread fire, then—Phoenix? Hell? Ever same news, new headlines: tendency toward decay. I find images by impulse—not systematically but motley menagerie. I draw hodgepodge-style from Romantic or Medieval or Renaissance periods: eenie meenie miney.  Then drag old masterwords into an arena where symbols become gimmicks and sentiment is recycled. Skim off only the most superficial (universal?) storyline and boil down to essence. Pandemic fear, pleasure, fate, pretense, possibility, oppression, propaganda. Prozac. Always the specifics change but the spirit remains. We pick what to see through rose colored glass.

Paint for me is fungus and acid. It vacuum-packs the moment past and then plunges it into the present as an unwitting victim of erosion that both obscures and reveals the moment’s face. At once irrevert and sincere, the gumball palette and modern-object/collaged interruptions jar an ability to locate the image in a history that won’t stand still.

I always hope to create an image that unravels more than it explains. Can a picture become a common text? We share an experience by looking at the same thing and a place for dialogue grows in the space between our individual interpretations and experiences.

-Lyndsey Scott, 4/2003