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Gallery IS
THIS HIP-HOP’S PICASSO? I am sure that neither Franz Kafka, nor Tupac Shakur have ever met Baltimore painter Larry Scott. Yes, it is quite absurd; one died seven years ago in a shower of nine millimeter mystery and counterfeit love, the other nearly a century ago from savage tuberculosis and public ennui. Yet the viscous that bonds all three is the need to be experienced; that humid, gothic desire fueling the mythic virus known as glitteraticosis, p.k.a. mad fame. Not that Scott, the 46-year-old Newark, New Jersey native and husband, father, and grandfather is sweating the art world for acceptance. His amazing work just wants you to holla if your feel it. In a snoring, regressive art culture populated with timid provocateurs, angry submissives, and cautious reactionaries, Scott is a quiet realist. Meeting him for the first time, and you might imagine the middle cousin between a young Gordon Parks, and the present day Denzel Washington. At the popular Xando-Cosi Coffee and Bar on 31st and Charles in East Baltimore - probably the best caffeine station in the city, and directly across the street from the prestigious Baltimore Museum Of Art - Larry Scott holds court with manager and assistant manager Randall Hurt and Sam Mason, along with some of the regulars; multi-media artist Natalie R. West, Nur the cabdriver, Mark Cottman and Jonathan Azor (two more great painters), and the novelist Jonathan Jackson - and appears to be beloved by everyone in the cafe. Scott is opinionated but not overbearing. He also serves as the curator for art gallery in Xandos, which hangs some notable work on both floors. He has created a loose collective of Baltimore artists known as ComZee, which includes the painters Cottman, Azor, Eugene R. Coles, Don Griffin, Jeffrey Kent, Tony McKissick, Arin Mitchell, and photographer/graphic artist Sutikare. Scott may be at the forefront of a new movement of black art on the east coast. I call it Art Noir Eleve, or “High Black Art.” And without question, Baltimore could become its epicenter. Jonathan Jackson - the nephew of “Notes From A Soledad Brother” author and 70s revolutionary George L. Jackson, and whose first novel, “The Reductionists”, penned under the pseudonym “Ivan O. Martin” is a striking debut - has nothing but bon mots for Scott. “Larry is not just a great painter. He is a friend who I can talk to when I need advice, and is in no way shape or form judgmental. But he will not pull any punches, either." A former world karate champion, Scott learned his skill from his late father, Walter Gerald Scott, who would paint cowboys and cartoon figures on brown paper bags from the supermarket. “My Dad and my Mom Juliette both supported my creative instincts. He was an incredible painter,” Scott told me in a recent interview. “He would paint cowboys, and figures from comic books with amazing precision. I was so fascinated by what he did, that he brought some pencils, crayons, paint and brushes for me, and would show me how to paint. His line was amazing; very strong and fluid. I think that’s why people say my line is so striking. It’s what I absorbed from my father.” When artists speak of line, it’s their imprimatur, their calling card. Analogous to Coltrane’s effervescent polyphonic runs, or Marvin’s urgent vibrato, a painter’s line will speak volumes about both the picture and the painter. In the massive corpus of Scott’s work, consisting of abstracts, figurative Expressionism, surrealism, and bold colorful portraits of historical figures like James Baldwin - whom he met in the airport at Brussels back in 1986, two years before he won his last and final world karate championship - the line really jumps out in his prolific, “Evolution Of Depression”. A series of 200, india ink on 18”x24” white paper (“I used a twig that I sharpened to paint that collection in three weeks” Scott says) “painting-drawins,” the oeuvre is vaguely reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s 1973 “Three Studies For A Self Portrait,” but has a feel all its own. Says Franklin Sirmans, the brilliant art critic, author, curator, and editor-in-chief AsiaArt/Pacific Magazine of Scott’s line in “Evolution Of Depression”; “The drawins almost feel like he’s working 3-D constructing forms with the line. Then there’s the almost abstraction of the work. The thing that hooks me is the simplicity/complexity of the black and whites..they just look mad original and damn good.” Not
long after meeting Baldwin during that Brussels layover - which
he says, “Talking to that man, a giant in American literature,
changed my life” - Scott, his wife Desiree,
and their four young adult children, moved from New
Jersey to Baltimore. Scott worked a
few regular nine-to-fives, but the painting became
more and more possessive of his time and eventually,
of him. “It got to the point,” Scott
says, “that when I sat down to work, there
were certain pieces that just had to come out of
me demanding its release. ‘Evolution
Of Depression’ was like that. It just jumped
out of me. If it wasn‘t for Desiree I would
have lost my mind a long time ago. I had to become
a painter full time, as the work demanded
to be seen,
heard, and felt.”
Sitting downstairs at Xandos and looking at Larry Scott‘s “Ready2Die…?(pt.1)," I feel the déjà vu of “Guernica” once again. It is a 32”x36” watercolor and acrylic, mixed-media tour de force focusing on the bandana’d, optic-less face of Tupac Shakur. His visage is the centerpiece, seemingly suspended in a place of spirit-sleep as faceless chimeras (one of whom has a sunburst of red splashed on the solar plexus; a murderous Rorschach?) adorned with twisted dreads and elastic, ghastly limbs, in some muted netherworld contention over the soul of the Eminence-Griese of Thug Life. It bottoms out with several alabaster caskets with crucifixes attached to them like deified antennae, which also entomb a collection of photographs; an ice-grilled Bobby Seale; a chocolate child-princess that could be one of the four girls bombed to bits in that Birmingham church; several Aunt Jemima archetypes, a sepia-toned and chiseled jaw soldier from World War I. “Ready2Die…?(pt1)” also bethinks one of Basquiats most engaging pieces, the 1982 acrylic and oil work titled “Profit I”. The crashing symbolism (of Byzantine halo ringed around the trademark grimacing doodle-head; a backdrop of crossed out mathematical figures, tic-tac-dough apocrypha; the Roman numerals “1981”) strikes a chord of suspicion that “Profit I” (One?) is actually “I, Profit”, a blistering self portrait. As if JMB has peeped game…the ones who make you make you corpulent with filthy lucre and fabulousness can’t wait to watch you wretch with spiritual anorexia. “
Ready2Die…?" (a series of six different pieces)
subsumes its own iconography, making Larry Scott
the first modern painter to depict rap as
a cultural crime scene. In doing so, Scott
both autopsies
rap’s infatuation with nihilist narcissism
and laments the malediction of def raps falling
on deafer ears in the midst
of
a graveyard of young
and beautiful corpses - not all of whom
are literally deceased - who undoubtedly
got rich
and most assuredly - in
some form or another - died
trying. Larry Scott can be reached at larryscottartist@yahoo.com The Youth Gallery seeks contributors to the Journal of Urban Youth Culture in the form of articles, poetry, music, photography and artwork, including digital art. Please e-mail us with your ideas, suggestions, and possible contributions. |
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