CLARE SCOTT

Review: Clare Scott/Road Trip For its first solo exhibition, the Mary Street Gallery has a superb Clare Scott show in oils, ROAD TRIP. In 2006, the artist took a solo journey across America, less to discover America and more to discover and reconnect with herself. The 38 small canvases and 10 larger and more panoramic pieces catches a touristy view of the freedom of the wide open spaces and more importantly, in this gallery, takes the viewer on a journey of discovery and beauty. Issues of size and scale confront you a lot, yet in this single room space there is such depth and insight. Sitting in the almost centre of the gallery I experienced elements of my life journey thro music – The Doors, Woody Guthrie, U2, Louden Wainright, Joni Mitchell – lots of American movies and the novels of Kerovac and the wild poetry of Ginsberg and iconic places like San Luis Obispo and Big Sur, as described by Richard Brautigan. In Clare Scott’s wok I was with Walt Whitman once again on the open road, when he said – Your road I enter upon and look around. I believe you are not all that is here. I believe that much unseen is also here. The small canvases in warm frames touch the loneliness of single beds, one coffee cup, a partial face in a rear view mirror, the top of a head beneath a giant tree, bare blitzed trees, wrecks of cars, bleached out places, warm sterile desolate images and the word RAGE appears once. Then, you notice the technique, the clever references to the artist in many of the paintings. Scott, on number plates, on signs, on cars, on menu boards and the quirky sense of humour with Bart Simpson turning his arse to the viewer – eat my art – You enjoy a Swollen Hand near a Dinosaur Footprint. Even in small pieces there is the image of a mirror in another surface like a desire for order, for sequence, for significance like condiment pots and ketchup bottles in a neat row. Clutter has a place, nothing is wasted. The landscapes are most interesting in the foreground than in the panorama. The shiny floor of the deserted Laundromat reflects the sense of detail as if the artist will discover the bigger picture through the ordinary and the mundane and then you come to Mojave Desert (Roadside Shrine) and the concrete angel has a downcast sulky face. This Road Trip is well worth the journey. Maura O’Connor, a Tenderloin poet, wrote in Gravity – There are things I know; trees don’t sing, birds don’t sprout leaves, the sky never turns to wine. Well, in Clare Scott’s

Clare Scott’s new exhibition – Down by the Sea at T-Bay Surf Centre on the beach in Tramore is a must see in this exquisite architectural location where the sting of the light and the tang of the sea are like companions to wonderful images. There is a wonderful American sense of Big Sur comes to Big Strand, and images from the artists last solo show Road Trip, especially Denny’s Diner come to mind. Here is a private artist, making sense of her inner world, by making images and sense of a bigger world or canvas. In Down by the Sea, there is a great sense of freedom despite fears about repetitive strain that could blight an artist’s career. At one stage I wanted to preview the work in the studio but Clare Scott was aghast as she sees the work as being site-specific and I have to agree that the Surf Centre works so well as these painting are in and about this gem of a structure. Many small images catch the mood, like coffee cups, Budweiser cans and discarded dolls’ heads but it is in the curvature in the work that mirrors the curvature and glass, airy structure of the place. Viewing the work shortly before it opened the Centre seemed private and tranquil, yet outside the surf was up and pounding. Nubile people at backs of cars or vans were wriggling into wetsuits or struggling out of them. Up the curved circular metal staircase there is a sense of the light – the bright light like in a Californian painting. In the work there is that wide open sense of freedom and adventure in paintings that seem almost bleached out with an intensity of style and skill as the artist hones back the detail to expose the essential image. Many of the studies are looking inward and outward as Scott suggests that nebulous sense of the end of summer, the end of the season yet there is no nostalgia just a freshness of vision. Upstairs in the curved and glass framed veranda of brown and yellow furniture there is a brilliant sense of the artist looking in and out and at the same time exploring what goes on in the mind of artists, surfers, pleasure seekers. The work is, of course, more than a surf place beside the sea and while I was there you could see and feel the light, the sea, the space and the inner world of the artist and the paintings. The ever changing moods of an end of summer party in a special place among special people. Go and see it all, as the show runs until the end of September. I look forward to the day this show comes to a white walled gallery like SOMA and I would expect to see and feel the fresh tang in the air and the tranquillity of a wide blue yonder.