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JULIAN M C SCOTT
Welcome to my website. Here you will find a little about me and my creative practice.
I was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex and moved to Bristol with my family when a small child. My father was the artist and sculptor Gerald Scott. My initial interests led me to study for a first degree in sculpture, followed a little later, by a master's degree in painting, which turned out to be a bit of a revelation and something of a ‘coming home’ for me.
I think that my time making sculpture gave me a particular view of spatiality and a relationship to material and process that remain central to my painting today. Sometimes, it seems to me that my paintings are as much a kind of unmade or un-makable sculpture as they are paintings. Not in the sense of depiction or illustration, but in that they explore aspects of an ontology that relates to sculptural, physical and tactile experience as well as a painterly one of colour, mark, gesture, surface and edge. For me, painting has always been a three dimensional activity. I seem to be working with a set of questions and propositions around ideas related to a phenomenology of placement and location that have not changed a great deal over the years, even though my responses to them have.
Alongside my creative practice I built a career as an art educator and I have taught at several art schools and universities in the UK. I came back to Bristol after ten years in London to teach at the Queens Road campus of Bristol Polytechnic's Faculty of Art & Design, which went on to become simply “Bristol School of Art”. I spent many years teaching both there and at UWE after that. Teaching for me was always very closely linked to my work as an artist. Teaching should, of course, be a creative activity in itself, but I found that the discursive nature of interaction with students would inform my own work in often unexpected ways and, in turn, my teaching was always influenced and informed by what was happening in my studio.
In 2021 I left teaching to concentrate full-time on my painting, working from my studio at the top of the house that I share with my wife and where we brought up our family.
JULIAN M C SCOTT
Welcome to my website. Here you will find a little about me and my creative practice.
I was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex and moved to Bristol with my family when a small child. My father was the artist and sculptor Gerald Scott. My initial interests led me to study for a first degree in sculpture, followed a little later, by a master's degree in painting, which turned out to be a bit of a revelation and something of a ‘coming home’ for me.
I think that my time making sculpture gave me a particular view of spatiality and a relationship to material and process that remain central to my painting today. Sometimes, it seems to me that my paintings are as much a kind of unmade or un-makable sculpture as they are paintings. Not in the sense of depiction or illustration, but in that they explore aspects of an ontology that relates to sculptural, physical and tactile experience as well as a painterly one of colour, mark, gesture, surface and edge. For me, painting has always been a three dimensional activity. I seem to be working with a set of questions and propositions around ideas related to a phenomenology of placement and location that have not changed a great deal over the years, even though my responses to them have.
Alongside my creative practice I built a career as an art educator and I have taught at several art schools and universities in the UK. I came back to Bristol after ten years in London to teach at the Queens Road campus of Bristol Polytechnic's Faculty of Art & Design, which went on to become simply “Bristol School of Art”. I spent many years teaching both there and at UWE after that. Teaching for me was always very closely linked to my work as an artist. Teaching should, of course, be a creative activity in itself, but I found that the discursive nature of interaction with students would inform my own work in often unexpected ways and, in turn, my teaching was always influenced and informed by what was happening in my studio.
In 2021 I left teaching to concentrate full-time on my painting, working from my studio at the top of the house that I share with my wife and where we brought up our family.