Preternatural: Michael Scott

Michael Scott’s landscapes embody the primacy of place. They draw from memory, archetypes, and iconic works of the American canon. His paintings aim not to capture a landscape’s particularity, as such, but to infuse it with the regenerative spirit of nature itself. He brings to the work his own sense of wonder, enabling viewers to engage with it from their own points of view. They are rewarded with a portal into America’s wild places, where the elements take center stage. In addition to 117 full-color plates, this volume features essays by art historians and curators illuminating the artist’s process and the ways in which his current series, Preternatural, situates him within the broader history of the American landscape tradition. As MaLin Wilson-Powell writes, Scott’s paintings offer a place where the natural world, the human world, and the world of the spirit or the soul can commingle. Together they comprise an arena that oscillates between what is there and what is not there, what the artist brings to it and what the viewer brings to it.