Scott Hiott has emerged unexpectedly from the cultural isolation of the small-town South to create a powerful body of painterly abstractions – works that combine muscular energy with esthetic sophistication, creative spontaneity with compositional integrity, and artistic originality with an awareness of the broad art historical context.
Through sheer force of curiosity and imagination, and almost entirely as an autodidact, Hiott was able to steep himself in virtually all of the significant abstract art from the 1940s onward. He accomplished this despite the fact that he was raised in the small town of Thomson, Georgia, didn’t start painting until he reached his 30s, and never had any formal training in art. He worked his way through a library of books on a wide range of modern and contemporary artists; he watched hundreds of hours of documentaries that featured artists making art and talking about the artistic process; and eventually he began visiting galleries and museums across the world. Hiott quickly developed a highly personal idiom and style, even though it finds inspiration in many of the giants of the past seven decades.
Working mostly in enamels and acrylics on canvas, Hiott paints at turns calmly and explosively, but always in the grip of the moment. The results are large canvases, often black and white, that bring broad bands of paint together with intricate brushwork, sometimes with areas of paint dripping and mixing down the length of the canvas, in which the astonishing mixture of colors and textures is always at the service of a powerful vision.
Suddenly, a broad architectural schema reminiscent of Franz Kline gives way to delirious passages of complex brushwork. Colors spill into each other and splash against each other with a seeming abandon that belies the muscle memory in his hand and the photographic memory of his immersion in painterly abstraction. A bold passage in black is gently brushed over with white; the white is then stroked with black. The results are a combination of powerful invention and earnest calculation, of cerebration and inspiration.
To understand the scale of Hiott’s accomplishment, you have to imagine the small town of Thomson, Georgia, where he grew up. Originally called Slashes, Thomson is home to about 6,000 people, and a real-life Georgia version of Dillon, Texas. On Friday nights, the entire town shuts down and goes to the game. “The whole town raises you,” says Hiott, “and not just your own family. Everyone is proud the town has one of the best football teams in the state, and won five state championships, but mostly it’s proud that it’s one of the best football communities in the state.”
And it was here that Hiott grew up, the son of a father he never met and a mother who left him to be raised by his grandmother. Hiott’s grandmother gave him both his work ethic and his values. Married at age 13, she worked two jobs, one in a factory and another as a short-order cook, while keeping house and raising six children, almost as many grandchildren, and half the neighborhood, too.
Hiott’s formative years were filled with sports and he was a naturally gifted athlete. In the classroom, however, he had trouble even seeing the blackboard. Nobody knew it at the time, including Hiott himself, but he was legally blind. It was not until he was 28 and had corrective surgery that he was able to see properly. His difficulties with vision throughout his childhood had the unforeseen reaction of making him extraordinarily attuned to the visual world as an adult. Once the obstacle of clear sight was overcome, he quickly thrust himself into painting, with palpable intricacy and intensity.
Now, when Hiott looks at an abstract painting, he trains his singular powers of observation not just on the art but on the artistic process as well. He absorbs a work not just by looking at the overall effect but by studying, literally stroke for stroke, the complex layering of color and brushwork. He understands the painting by looking for traces of the imaginative process that went into its creation. What colors did the artist begin with? How viscous or liquid were the paints? How long did the artist allow one color to dry before adding a new layer or a new color – or mixing it wet-in-wet?
This focus on the painterly process makes Hiott almost obsessive about discovering new ways of putting paint on canvas. He scrapes paint with a metal straight edge, spurts it directly from the tube, pours it directly from the can, and brushes it with everything from synthetic materials to the full range of natural animal hairs. Occasionally, he even applies paint to canvas with his hands, rubbing it across the canvas to ravishing effect. In his “Sling Shot” series, he literally grabs the paint and flings it horizontally across the canvas, jerking his wrist as he releases the paint, bringing an athlete’s strength and muscle memory into the act of putting paint on canvas. When he enters the creative zone, Hiott is like an athlete who has trained for an event, then centers his mind, and then allows the process to take over. At that point, he has complete control of his hand – an athlete’s control.
At a time when art has come so often to be primarily about identity, Hiott’s paintings are less a record of his particular life story than a celebration of the ability of a truly gifted individual, regardless of the happenstance of childhood, to become part of a common world culture.