The Abstract Landscape Paintings of Scott Gellatly
By Bob Bahr
“I love the notion that a painting only has to answer to itself,” says Scott Gellatly, and the quickest glance at his recent work shows how that approach has paid off. His paintings don’t look like landscapes, but they feel like them. In short, he seeks the ephemeral experience of the landscape, distilled yet open-ended.
“If I’m in the field doing a casein painting, a sketch in my sketchbook, or an oil painting, there is a constant battle of how much visual information I take away from the landscape. How much do I compose the painting on its own merits? It may take on a life of its own and go beyond what I’m looking at in the landscape. For me there is always a visual difference between what I observe and what I come away with. How do I make the best painting possible, understanding that when that small plein air study becomes a studio painting, it has to work on its own?
“I remember that the viewer is not looking at the painting and the landscape at the same time. The painting must work on its own accord. I love exploring that visual gap, that visual difference between how the landscape exists, how the plein air piece exists, how the studio painting exists, and how the viewer experiences it.”
By almost completely abstracting the landscape, Gellatly distills the experience of nature to its essence, and, perhaps more important, he delves into the concept of “art for art’s sake” — an idea that is still somewhat controversial, or at least divisive, going back at least 150 years. The Portland painter is a student of art in several ways: an expert on art materials; a longtime painter; a student of art history; and a teacher of technique, creativity, and observation. His influences span many art movements, with the abstract expressionists figuring prominently.
“The language of abstraction is the language I use to explore that gap between the landscape and the art,” Gellatly says. “I love abstraction. I love the spirit behind abstract expressionism as a way to further explore the formal concerns of painting. The best abstract art is tethered in our experience out in the world and our experience with nature.”
Gellatly sees the through-line that abstraction holds in art history; he talks of how Mark Rothko is an extension of what J.M.W. Turner was informed by, and about what Joan Mitchell took from Monet. “So much energy is brought into those paintings,” he says.
For years Gellatly served as the product manager at Gamblin Artist Oil Colors, so he knows color. Perhaps that lends to his appreciation for Rothko and the master’s placement of colors next to each other in a field, creating a tension, perhaps even a vibration, between the thin, built-up clouds of color in his landscape paintings.
“I love the idea of pure color and shape interaction,” Gellatly says. “At the end of the day, all painting is abstraction. It’s colored, gooey stuff on a canvas. We are all using the same kinds of tools — shape, color, mark-making, and surface — be it photorealist or abstract. The question becomes where on that spectrum we want to live. I like navigating that area between representationalism and abstraction, not being in just one place on that spectrum. The filter of the mind is itself an abstraction. I think the best plein air painting is a combination of what we visually take from the landscape and the qualities of ourselves that we bring to it. That’s where artistic voice comes into it.”
Continue reading this article in PleinAir® Magazine (February/March 2023 issue).
And browse more landscape paintings here at OutdoorPainter.com
