Biography

Canadian painter Scott Pattinson was trained in architecture and urban design (University of Toronto, 2003) and although he did not pursue architecture as an artistic career, his painting subject matter continues an exploration and meditation upon urbanization and tensions between manufactured landscapes and spiritual fulfillment. For Pattinson, painting offered a more immediate creative flexibility and emotional multiplicity that architectural design could not. From his formal training however, he draws upon sculptural elements to define his painting style; often using a wide brush, thick and raucous palette, and actionable approach. A prolific painter, Pattinson’s body of work uniformly evokes the energy of his intense and conscious engagement of the moment where emotion and sensuality are built into mapped geometries of specificity and architectural endorsement.

Since 2005, Pattinson’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, with recent shows in Prince Edward County (Oeno Gallery, 2018),  and a survey of the past decade’s work at Gallery Stratford (2014). While maintaining a rigorous painting and exhibition schedule, Pattinson also dedicates his time to travel which has informed his recent series’ Adrift and Pacific. In examining physical landscapes, both national and international, his work presents a vital examination of external environments that create internal reactions. Carrying on the tradition of abstract expressionism, Pattinson’s work defies a static understanding, seeking to exist in the flux of undulating realities and malleable logistics. Early series such as Rafter (2005) and Torewa (2007) show broad strategies of expression in bold lines that later culminate in the tight, twisting geometries of work such as Silence (2008-2010) and Pacific (2010-2012). In the Pacific II and Clyde House series, a new dimension of Pattinson’s work is revealed where taut intricacies and full-blown expressions of colour are replaced by a choreography of looser intonations and marks that float and stamp upon a field of white space. The Clyde House works represent an evolution in his work, backing away from hard edges and canvas boundaries, moving towards a freer, unbounded iteration.

Montreal art critic R.M. Vaughan is exuberant in his description of Pattinson’s most recent works (Denouement, Kairoi, Ouvert): “Pattinson plays with the emotional triggers of colors, mostly by slamming together unlikely, even decadent, contrasting hues and then encases those associations, the metonymic readings possible, with harsh, cutting and calligraphic blackish strokes. A Pattinson painting is a bird nest built in the rafters of a disco, an ornamental garden behind bars, a severe steel tower struck by a hurricane, with all the pretty interior decor blown out and splayed across the strike zone.”

Pattinson’s paintings are in many Corporate and Private Collections in Canada and Internationally, and his work has been reviewed in prestigious publications including the National Post and the Edmonton Journal. He paints from a renovated barn in rural Southern Ontario and a cabin in the Muskokas.

He is represented exclusively with Oeno Gallery (Toronto, CANADA).

Please also see Scott’s Curriculum Vitae.

For the most updated images of works for sale, be sure to follow Scott on 1stDibs or Artsy