When Joan Scott first made her move toward abstraction, she was
still painting landscapes.

The time was the late 1990s; the place was upstate New York, and
Scott was painting evergreen forests and sloping hills, frosty winters
and yellow-green springs. Even then, she wasn’t making fully
representational images.

“Adirondack Lake in Winter,” an oil on canvas from 1998, conjures up
the deep green of the trees and the brilliant white of the frozen lake
covered in snow. But the shapes are simplified: The sharp spikes of the
pines are blunted; the lake is more color field than realistic
depiction. Everything is soft-edged, blurry.

“Yellow Hill,” another oil on canvas from 1998, is a steep diagonal
of summer green slanting below a cerulean sky. The piece has the look
of a photo that’s been computerized to imitate a painting. Scott even
painted a faint grid over the slope, mimicking the viewfinder of a
camera. Inside the grid’s squares, the original colors of the landscape
have been reduced to pools of pigment. Each one is a tiny color field
painting.

Scott’s pure abstractions from the time weren’t much to look at.
“Kiva,” an oil on canvas from 1997, is plain, plain, plain, with flat
planes of paint arranged in rectangles. Two vertical reds and two
vertical blacks are suspended over white. There’s not much of interest
here, no surface texture, nothing but expanses of monochrome paint.
Without the landscape, Scott seemed at a loss as to how to make a
painting purely about form and color.

Fast-forward a dozen years, and Scott finds herself in a different
landscape, the desert Southwest—she lives in Tucson—and
practicing a different painting style. Her solo show at the Ranch House
Gallery at Agua Caliente Park on the far northeast side of town traces
her evolution into a capable abstractionist. In the aptly named
Abstractions and Landscapes, she exhibits recent acrylics on
oils and mixed media on paper, as well as the old landscapes.

Of the 18 works in the show, the best and liveliest are the mixed
media on paper. “Untitled,” from 2009, is an energetic combo of
acrylic, charcoal and colored pencil on gessoed paper. Twenty-nine
inches high and 21 inches wide, it’s a frisky composition of organic
shapes in white, orange, red, black and gold. Sketched in black
charcoal, they’re like puzzle pieces that fit together, with colors
that spill over the edges.

The colors are pleasantly layered. Red leaks through white. Black
appears under yellow. The sprightly work is a world away from the
plain-Jane “Kiva.”

Another recent piece, “Osala,” from 2007-2009, is mixed media on
thick, raggedy-edged paper. A geometry of vertical lines and
rectangles, this one reverberates in spring greens and golds. Lavender
floats in between chalk blue lines racing up the paper.

The textures vary, too. Paint is side by side with oil pastels, and
the creamy paints make a pointed contrast to the chalky scribbles.
Scott has studied with local painters Cynthia Miller and Josh Goldberg;
it’s hard not to see the influence of Miller’s cheerful mixed-media
works on her student.

“Secret Love,” from 2009, could well be an homage to Matisse. An oil
on gessoed paper, it’s a joyous choreography of colored lines in blue
and green dancing on white. Behind the darting lines are wider bands of
color, shots of ocher and pink. The paints are luscious, too, thick and
textured.

A couple of the smaller works, “Yellow Stripes I” and “II,” are
disciplined studies. Made in 2004, they show Scott working out the ways
paint and shape can be manipulated. “I” has golden bands interspersed
with blue-black, with the white of the paper showing through the
rough-edged sides. A red-colored lozenge floats behind the stripes.

Scott is still experimenting with several different approaches. Her
acrylics on canvas are not as successful as the mixed-media pieces.
Where the mixed media seem to jump right off the paper, the acrylics
seem flat and a little monotonous.

“It’s All in the Telling,” from 2007-2009, is typical. An acrylic on
canvas 24 inches square, it’s all dark red and earth-green against
black. Like the others in the series, it’s on the dark side, without
the pop and contrast given by the bright whites in the mixed-media
works. The shapes are scattershot, too, without the elegance of Scott’s
more geometric works or the exuberance of “Untitled.”

“To Dream or Not to Dream” works the same color scheme—red and
orange-yellow against black—but Scott has added some textural
interest by rolling on some paint and scraping other passages away. “I
Could Have Danced All Night” has ribbons of green zipping around over
red—rather like the leavings on a Christmas morning.

“The Road to Somewhere,” 2007, is probably the best of the lot. It’s
got the standard colors—red and yellow against black—but it
has white to relieve the monotony. And the shapes are more distinct.
Curving bands in white gyrate across the earth colors, a hint that
Scott may yet again be inspired by the land. Here you can see the
influence of Goldberg, a Tucson abstractionist whose large paintings
sometimes suggest imaginary landscapes.

Scott is brave to exhibit paintings representing the multiple stops
on her artistic journey, both good and not so good. Those energetic
white bands, those roads to somewhere, suggest a road map for the
journey yet to come.

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.