MAY: A Feast for the Eye – Jerry Scott

We are delighted to welcome artist Jerry Scott to our exhibition space in May 2024. His paintings, collages and prints  aspire to be a feast for the eye: a distillation of all the fulsome sensations and emotions which I experience in response to the colours and textures of the world about me.

Jerry Scott’s collages have rightly been called a journey through colour and texture, offering an experience of great richness and depth. Their characterful material presence owes much to the fact that he designs and prints his own papers, many of which are close- patterned and therefore add to the density of the overall effect.

In Jerry’s words; “I do not have any notion at the outset of what the finished picture will look like. I try not to think my way forward consciously during the making process and the successful pictures form themselves. No preconceived “style” shapes the pictures, though previous work plays its part.

It is an ecstatic process, full of joy and it is impossible to articulate fully what drives it. First and foremost, the pictures must speak for themselves. Beyond this, I know that colour and texture have always been at the heart of my relationship with the world about me. As a child I was fascinated and thrilled by such things as the velvety purple-blue of violets growing on a hedgerow bank, the buttery yellow and pale green of cowslips in a field, the purple and crimson cascade of a fuchsia, the magenta hues of Sweet Williams, the glossy brown of a freshly shelled horse-chestnut. 

From an early age, I felt a powerful urge to respond actively, with pens, pencils and paints, to the onslaught of colour sensations and these efforts were nearly always abstract. I remember the urgency with which I set about it, an urgency which has remained to this day.  Occasionally the urgency got the better of me and with no scraps of paper to hand, I would scrawl in blank pages of books and on the wall next to my bed. I am scrawling still.

Biography

Born in 1950 Jerry Scott was educated in Cambridge and Sussex, briefly reading Theology at Cambridge University before leaving to study sculpture at Norwich Art School and at St Martin’s, London.

He moved to Yorkshire thirty seven years ago. His most recent solo exhibition was ‘A Feast for the Eye’ at Clare Hall, Cambridge.  In recent years he has also  had, amongst others, solo exhibitions of paintings and collages in London, York, Ripon and Halifax. He has work in numerous private collections throughout the UK, Switzerland, Italy and the US. He also has work in the Tavistock (London) and York Hospitals Trust collections, York Minster and Clare Hall.