Patrick Scott

The Artist's Estate

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La succession de l'artiste

Aidan Dunne, Patrick Scott, Liberties Press, 2008, illustrated p.119

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Aidan Dunne, Patrick Scott, Liberties Press, 2008, illustré p.119

Making its auction debut, the present work is a major example by Patrick Scott comprising four canvases and the essential motifs of Scott’s distinctive oeuvre. Executed in 1966, it dates only two years after Scott began his celebrated Goldpainting series, developing compositions from simple arrangements of forms, usually discs or grids, towards more complicated configurations. The present work is particularly successful in its harmonising unity, the gold leaf strips creating a central diamond shape around which the painting rotates. Among his contemporaries in Ireland Scott was a singular pioneer of the new minimalist strain in abstraction, countering the previously dominant style of Abstract Expressionism. The simplified and meditative aesthetic of these works shows an innate sympathy for the East. Although he did not visit Japan or China until the 1980s, his original interest was guided by his friendship with the American painter Morris Graves, who lived in Ireland in the 1950s and introduced him to Japanese painting, and the work of Mark Tobey. Scott denied any spiritual dimension to his work, but they emphatically possess a contemplative and affirmative quality. 

When asked about the lack of titles for the Goldpaintings Scott replied, ‘what would a title do but give rise to a thought.’ Such a response directly refers to Scott’s Zen practise of expressing the void and allowing the painting to be whatever the viewer experienced of themselves and for themselves.