Scott McKinley

I am an independent artist. I live and work in Palmetto Bay, FL.

The paintings and constructions in my latest body of work, the COASTAL group, feature banal shapes of sailboats, seaside walkways, steps and benches and are consciously rudimentary depictions. The works are idiosyncratically colored and have rich, sensuously-textured surfaces. The rudimentary qualities may, at worst, suggest a form of naivety and at best, an ironic stance. But neither is the case. Behind the simplified shapes and the heavily worked surfaces is my intuition that ordinary, personal experiences carry transcendent meanings which can be embodied in, and are directly discoverable in, art forms.
My stance is that painting has to be continuously reinvented away from the purely formal, the decorative, and the spectacle, towards a new kind of depiction. This is if painting is to have any hope of giving us a sense of our place in current reality. My aim is to recharge painting with work that is grounded in the personal, grounded in the primitive impulse to rudimentary form, and is frankly sensuous enough to embody emotion.

For me drawing is a direct and genuine way of knowing and discovering. I draw daily and my drawings are mostly diagrammatic. For me the diagram is a useful “distancing” tactic….the diagram points one away from the drawing itself towards a separate content. The drawings stand alone as individual statements and are also used to inform paintings.
I regularly make small and medium-sized paintings, the frequency of which depends upon the complexity of the painting process. I work on several at once using a variety of means to apply the materials so that the paintings exploit the sensuous qualities of traditional materials. I use acrylic paint, mediums and spray, latex paint, Flasche, charcoal and various chalks and crayons on stretched canvas.
I also make wall-mounted painted constructions. Rudimentary, diagrammatic shapes of known things in vertical “stack” arrangements are common in all these works. My constructions are made with painted, reclaimed wood and cardboard mounted on a wood armature. They are frequently coated in clear epoxy resin. The constructions often prefigure paintings, but now seem to be developing in to a distinct body of separate works.

I show and sell my work privately and at occasional art fairs or through commissions to those interested. Work is also available through my website. Previously my work has been available through galleries. I have works in private collections in Los Angeles, London and Miami. Large paintings are in corporate and university collections in Florida and Massachusetts.