{"id":7296,"date":"2026-08-20T12:38:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T12:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=7296"},"modified":"2026-08-20T12:38:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T12:38:30","slug":"after-four-decades-a-bay-area-artist-reveals-his-art-is-more-than-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=7296","title":{"rendered":"After four decades, a Bay Area artist reveals his art is more than \u2018nothing\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jack Scott pinned the top edge of \u201cLocust\u2019s\u201d 17-foot canvas across the studio wall with the help of two assistants. As the drawing\u2019s charcoal marks were slowly revealed, Scott cocked his head and refocused. The abstract image looked like a flock of swallows.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s right. \u2026 That\u2019s right. \u2026 Oh, this is amazingly black,\u201d said Scott, the 73-year-old Marin County native. \u201cI haven\u2019t visited it in 50 years. I really forgot what this one looked like \u2013 I thought I knew. It\u2019s just lost in the blur of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott and his agent Michele Hembree have revealed 10 of the artist\u2019s most treasured works for the first time in decades at the Mark See Photography Studio in Alameda. The exhibit runs through Friday, Aug. 21, as Scott attempts a late-career revival of his \u201cart about nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott\u2019s artwork hung in premier art museums in California in the 1970s: the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the William Sawyer Art Gallery in San Francisco and the Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis. Contemporary art critics like Thomas Albright praised the \u201cdisembodied, transparent quality\u201d of his monumental charcoal pieces, adding they \u201cseem to detach themselves from the acres of blank canvas around them and hang, like free-floating mirages, in some ambiguous space.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as Scott pivoted toward an even more overt style of nothingness with the \u201cStudy for a Black Drawing\u201d series in the 1980s, his earlier works fell out of vogue and became more difficult to place in exhibits.<\/p>\n

Style comes from simplicity in Scott\u2019s work. Employing a reductive approach, his artwork focuses on the drama that occurs between light and dark, the balance between the pallid white canvas and the blackness of charcoal, he said. It\u2019s his attempt to create an \u201cideal void\u201d as a physical manifestation, to confront death not as an ominous force but an old friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cScott\u2019s web of soft, undulating arcs subverts the large-scale coolness of the primary form. In this sense the artist\u2019s works remind one of Rothko, whose monumental forms were also conceived through a diffused or soft-edge development,\u201d the late San Francisco art critic Hal Fischer wrote in a review of Scott\u2019s exhibit at the William Sawyer Gallery for the November 1978 edition of Artforum magazine. \u201cScott\u2019s web of soft, undulating arcs subverts the large-scale coolness of the primary form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott grew up in Novato, a town of 5,000 people, where the Highway 101 exit was only a stop sign until 1971. It was a nice life, he said, but there was \u201cnothing much to do in Novato.\u201d He had developed a skill for hyperrealistic drawing in his youth, but it was when he began taking art classes at the College of Marin that he began to experiment with abstract art.<\/p>\n

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The Bay Area\u2019s art community was still drawing heavily from the Beat Generation, as its key literary figures, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, championed boundary-pushing, spontaneous creation and raw, authentic lived experiences. Scott paid close attention to artist Mark Rothko\u2019s shift toward abstraction, and he specifically noted artist Morris Louis\u2019 \u201cveil shapes\u201d that influenced his own atmospheric forms.<\/p>\n

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But it was the Sonoma coast, with its obscuring fog and luminous sun rays, that impacted how he viewed shadow and light. So it was as an art student in his 20s that he became curious: What if he took away all the color and forms, leaving everything except the bare essentials?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was sort of like this silly, absurd attempt to create the ideal void,\u201d Scott said. \u201cIt\u2019s humorous on one level to try to find the perfect proportions and density of marks and dark to light or whatever, to make this ideal drawing of nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing took shape on Tuesday, when Scott unrolled \u201cLocust,\u201d a 1976-77 artwork that he had spent some two months drawing. Three people were required to place the canvas on the art studio wall, meticulously spreading each inch of canvas to remove any wrinkles.<\/p>\n

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Fully unrolled, the canvas was the size of the cargo container, looking like a dust storm descending over a desert town. The sheer scale of Scott\u2019s art is one of his primary modes to engage an audience, like creating an environment that envelops a room.<\/p>\n

As he stood before the drawings once more, examining his work, a sanguine smile crept across Scott\u2019s face. It was less like reviewing an archive and more like stepping through a portal to shake hands with his younger self \u2013 one he hadn\u2019t seen in 50 years, he said.<\/p>\n

At the time Scott created \u201cLocust,\u201d he was in graduate school, painting houses for money while immersing himself in his passion for abstract art. When asked how he evaluated the work of his younger self, he said that time was the ultimate judge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was my innocent attempt to dive into the idea of mystery and the void. When you\u2019re right in the moment, you don\u2019t know whether the piece is going to live or last,\u201d Scott said. \u201cAnd then over time, it proves you wrong or right.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The famed artist Jack Scott is revealing his acclaimed abstract drawings for the first time in decades in Alameda this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAfter four decades, a Bay Area artist reveals his art is more than \u2018nothing\u2019 - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=7296\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"After four decades, a Bay Area artist reveals his art is more than \u2018nothing\u2019 - 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