Tim Scott by David Moos & Ken Carpenter

square 8vo. pp. 128. illustrated. boards. Toronto: DM Books, 2008.

ISBN-10: 096907591X / ISBN-13: 9780969075912

______________________________________________________________________________________________

In the 1950s Tim Scott studied architecture, and simultaneously, attended the St. Martin's School of Art studying sculpture part-time. His early work was heavily influenced by his teacher, Anthony Caro. Scott moved to Paris to work aAtelier Le Corbusier-Wogenscky, an architectural firm and while there, he discovered photographs of the work of American sculptor David Smith. Smith was to have a strong influence on a generation of British sculptors in the 1960s. Scott returned to London in 1961. Encouraged by Anthony Caro, he, along with other students at the St. Martin's school, rejected traditional methods and began to work abstractly. For an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965, they were dubbed the 'New Generation'. While Caro and a few other students began using industrial steel, Scott chose instead to work with fibre-glass, a relatively new material for sculpture. By the mid-sixties, Scott was experimenting with different kinds of plastics and bold volumetric shapes of bright colour. The sculptural works in the book and in the current exhibition at Pacart are from this period. From the foreword: The roots of abstract painting and sculpture reach back to the beginning of the 20th Century. In those roots was the start of a new language. At times painting seemed to spill into sculpture. In the decade between 1910 and 1920 Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Elie Nadelman, Pablo Picasso and the Russian Constructivists all made coloured sculpture. By the early 1960s, the optimism that pervaded the Art World once more supercharged the dialogue between painting and sculpture. It was thought that sculpture could take the lead from painting and that colour would become three dimensional. Tim Scott introduced colour and new materials and was very much part of what animated this idea. Kenneth Noland's circle paintings were transformed by David Smith into painted steel sculpture, while Anthony Caro took weight away from sculpture and floated colour space.