Susan G. Scott
Her work is found in national and international public collections including the Canada Council for the Arts, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Collection du Fonds régional d'art contemporain d’Île-de-France in Paris, Canada - Israel Cultural Foundation in Jerusalem and Houston Baptist University in Texas.
"[1] Following a brief period of gestural landscapes in the early 1980s, Scott focused on narrative figurative painting with protagonists in dramatic mise en scene inspired by literature or art history.
"[3] Art historian and critic Hedwidge Asselin noted her skill with light: "the painter’s gaze encompass the forms and volumes, the distances in space, the colors, harmonies, contrasts and values".
[4] Described by curator Joan Murray as a "master of colour",[5] in 2014 Scott set aside the figure to convey – in gestural brush stroke on a white ground – "nature as a living, changing subject.
[14][15] In 1993 Scott's feminist interpretation of Joseph and His Brothers The Dreamer Series – influenced by Harold Bloom's and David Rosenberg's Book of J – exhibited at Galerie Michel Tétreault (Montreal QC).
[15] At this time, Scott's monochromatic portraits of children – with "frantic action figures looming out of the background as if they were figments of the child's teeming imagination," – were favorably reviewed by Gary Michael Dault in The Globe and Mail.
These paintings – investigations of subject matter – were exhibited at Galerie d'Art du Parc (Trois-Rivières QC) and FOFA Gallery of Concordia University.
[22] Following trips to Asia and the study of Chinese philosophy and landscape techniques, Scott returned to "quick light brush strokes" on a white, stone-paper ground – for the 2014 water series Notations – exhibited at Beaux-arts des Amériques (Montreal QC).
[6] In 2021 Scott received a commission through the program for the integration of the arts into architecture and the environment from Québec's Ministère de la Culture et des Communications for a large mural in the mezzanine of a new primary school in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec.
"[25] In the Los Angeles review of Scott's AIDS series Forgotten Histories, Marlena Donohue wrote: "These paintings crackle with the intense heat of sensuality and a good deal of anguish.
[22] Considered a pivotal Quebec artist, in La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960 anthologist Robert Bernier wrote: "Susan G. Scott has mastered the art of generating in action, a psychological pattern.... tensions, emotions, and thoughts which, with time, develop fully in the viewer’s mind."
