Scott Conary
Scott Conary is a painter originally from the east coast but now living & working in Portland, OR. It seems like every American painter I’ve noticed over the last year lives in Brooklyn or Portland. In any case, I was hanging out on Pinterest and saw a great painting of a cut of meat that I pinned to my own board immediately. I’ve been going back to look at it for a week or two now and it still captivates me. Unlike many artworks on Pinterest, this one was correctly attributed and even linked to the artist’s site, so here we are, Scott Conary. Lo and behold, not one painting of meat, but lots of them – these are 3 of my favourites – click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
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- Scott Conary - lamb chop 4
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- Scott Conary - lamb chop
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- Scott Conary - wall chop
The meat paintings are, understandably, the pieces that elicit the most questions. The first is usually, “Why meat?” The glib answer is “you can only paint so many pears.” The longer answer is that the meat is beautiful and mildly evocative. We have a much more complicated reaction to a hunk of lamb than we do to pepper. The meat is the stuff of us. We are, after all, meat. The smell shifts while I work. The color changes. I have vivid memories of meals with family and friends built around meat.It’s beautiful, desirable, and it’s unclean.
– Scott Conary
It’s hard to look at a painting of meat and not think of Rembrandt and Soutine, of course. Which is not to say that Conary’s work is deriviative, but rather that it exists within a tradition of still life that goes back centuries.
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- Rembrandt - Carcass of Beef - 1657
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- Soutine - Side of Beef 1924-5
The French term for “Still Life” is “Nature Morte“, which translates literally as “dead nature”. Seems fitting here. There is a lushness to paintings of meat that is simultaneously attractive and repellant, gruesome and beautiful. There’s something kind of transcendant about that, to me. That said, Conary’s oeuvre is substantially broader than paintings of meat. Conary’s work, while very painterly, rests strongly within traditions of representational realism which I find reassuring to see in this age of installation and performance art. I suggest you check out his portfolio site, there is lots to like.
