Ian Christopher Scott (20 April 1945 – 27 June 2013) was a New Zealand painter. His work was significant for pursuing an international scope and vision within a local context previously dominated by regionalist and national concerns. Over the course of his career he consistently sought to push his work towards new possibilities for painting, in the process moving between abstraction and representation, and using controversial themes and approaches, while maintaining a highly personal and recognisable style. His work spans a wide range of concerns including the New Zealand landscape (especially West Auckland), popular imagery (particularly the representation of the female figure), appropriation and art historical references. Scott's paintings are distinctive for their intensity of colour and light. His approach to painting is aligned with the modernist tradition, responding to the formal standards set by the American painters Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
Ian Scott was born in Bradford, England, on 20 April 1945, the oldest of five sons. His family initially lived in the village of Baildon on the Yorkshire Moors near Bradford. In 1952, when Scott was seven, his parents, Barbara (Cox) and John Scott, moved the family to Auckland, New Zealand, seeking a life that offered more opportunity than the severe world of post-World War II England.
Scott's early interest in art, before moving to New Zealand, was fostered by his maternal grandfather, Ernest Cox, an amateur watercolourist. Scott would make sketches as he accompanied his grandfather on painting trips around the moors.
In Auckland, he painted landscapes in both oils and watercolour of Sunnyvale, the Waitākere Ranges and the West Coast and, when he attended Kelston Boys' High School, took art classes with the prominent New Zealand painter Garth Tapper and Rex Head, a regular entrant in the Kelliher Art Award for landscape painting. In 1963 Scott attended evening classes run by Colin McCahon at the Auckland Art Gallery.
In 1964 he began studies at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, and in 1965 his tutors there included Tapper and McCahon. Scott up a friendship with fellow student Richard Killeen, and during his time at art school also met Michael Dunn, who became an important historian of New Zealand art, and Petar Vuletic, a controversial critic and later partner of the Petar/James Gallery that would include Scott as one of its artists. Scott completed his Diploma in Fine Arts with Honours in 1967, and was awarded the Fowlds Memorial Prize. The following year he began training as a Secondary School teacher at the Auckland Teachers' Training College.
Scott met Nan Corson in 1978. They briefly lived in the Auckland suburb of Epsom before purchasing a house in Mt Eden. Their son, Chris Corson-Scott, was born in 1985, and is an artist working in the medium of photography in Auckland, New Zealand.
Main periods and series of work
Scott established an early reputation as a landscape painter, winning the junior section of the Kelliher Art Award in 1965 with Low Tide, Anawhata (Kelliher Art Trust) and a Merit Prize in 1966. During this period, while studying at Elam, he also painted abstract works and developed a representational style which he referred to as "New Realism". The latter were informed by developments in American painting of the early 1960s, such as the Pop Art of James Rosenquist, and include paintings of suburban weatherboard houses (characteristic of 1960s West Auckland), often placed incongruously in landscape settings such as Milford Sound or Auckland's West Coast. Some of these paintings are made up of two panels and divided into several separate images. Lockheed L-188 Electra aircraft are sometimes visible in the sky, and in several paintings, including Air Disaster Over Mt Sefton (1967, Wallace Arts Trust), two or more aircraft crash spectacularly and comically. In these early paintings we see the beginnings of the kind of disjunctive imagery, or collisions of different traditions and realities, that became a conspicuous feature of Scott's work.
"New Realist"/"Girlie" series, 1967–70
In 1967 Scott's stylised landscapes began to feature women clad in bikinis or fashionable garments of the era such as mini skirts – images that were often appropriated from popular culture, including magazines (such as Vogue and Playboy) and newspapers. They feature landscapes that capture the distinctive emblems of West Auckland, such as native forest and Kauri trees and West Coast beaches. The style of painting, with meticulously and smoothly rendered transitions and details, knowingly takes up the "hard-edged" tradition in New Zealand painting associated with Rita Angus, McCahon and Don Binney.
Scott's paintings of the 1967–70 period have been labelled the "Girlie" series on account of their frolicking, scantily clad female protagonists. Important examples of works that fit this description include Land of Dreams (1968–69, private collection), Rainbow Girl (1969, Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato), Homage to Morris Louis (1969, Real Art Roadshow), Jumpover Girl (1969, Victoria University of Wellington), Leapaway Girl (1969, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) and Sky Dash (1969–70, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), Agronomist (1970) and Teller (1970).
Leapaway Girl is probably the most well-known of these works, which former curator at Te Papa William McAloon has described as being "produced at a time when the histories of New Zealand painting were being written and the identification of an authentic local tradition – one rooted in the landscape, the harsh New Zealand light and its clearly delineated forms – was paramount." However, McAloon also acknowledges the international influences Scott was fusing with New Zealand art, writing: "Not that all the references are local: elsewhere in the series Scott drew on images of contemporary American abstraction, and even here the bold colours of the leaping frock suggest a color field painting gone airborne. More obvious touchstones for the series are American pop artists Mel Ramos, in his paintings of pin-ups, and Tom Wesselmann in his Great American Nude series." Leapaway Girl was one of 166 paintings included by the Museum of New Zealand in their 2012 launch of their online collection.
However, there are a large number of paintings in the series, including major examples, that do not fit the popular perception of the "Girlie" series. These include portraits of notable figures in the artist's life, such as his brother (Nigel at Anawhata, 1968–69), fellow artists (Colin McCahon in North Otago, 1967–68, Hocken Library, University of Otago; Don Binney at Te Henga, 1969–70, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) and his Wellington dealer (Peter McLeavey, 1969–70, Collection of Peter McLeavey). Others have images of couples and children, both idealised and absurd (Offspring, 1969, Table Baby, 1970, and Golden Dreams, 1969, Te Manawa, Palmerston North).
Track (1968, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) is based on a photograph of the publisher – and protector of endangered Kauri forests – A.H. Reed with his daughter and grandchildren; Scott has them posing stolidly in front of an Auckland Regional Council sign and a stand of Kauri trees. The radical and iconic nature of this painting prompted the poet and art-writer David Eggleton to exclaim that it "charges out of the late 1960s like a rogue elephant," a phrase that nicely captures Scott's propensity for brazenly disrupting the norms and conventions of New Zealand art.
Scott's teacher-training obligated him to take up a teaching position upon completion of the programme. He moved to Nelson and taught art at Nelson College. Over the next couple of years he painted the Tasman Bay series – ostensibly abstract paintings, though with a landscape feeling, which have thick fields of muted colour, greens and yellows predominantly, and reflect Scott's interest in the "thick field" paintings of the American Larry Poons. Also from the Nelson period is a series of paintings with flat, cartoonish figurative elements as well as abstract shapes and textures (such as an effect resembling the stucco cladding of his rented flat). The overall significance of the paintings of this period lies in the way the artist translates the feelings and imagery of his immediate environment into an abstract idiom directly comparable with developments in American modernism, particularly the paintings of Poons and Olitski. In 1971 Scott visited Auckland to see an exhibition of paintings by Morris Louis at the Auckland Art Gallery. The exhibition left a lasting impression, and Scott was particularly impressed by the almost 24-foot long Unfurled painting, Beta Nu (1960, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra).