To ponder a Scott Christensen painting—be it of the Snake River gathering autumn from a cluster of cottonwoods, the Pacific Ocean swelling and breaking against the rocky coast of California, or a breathless morning in a southern marsh— is to trade for a moment the thrum of daily life for the buoyancy, the hopefulness of nature. In these works are traces of something Wordsworth once said, about how in the outdoors we find reflected the very spirit that drives our imaginations. Like the landscape itself, there is in Scott's work a sense that the painting is forever on the cusp of movement, that the light and leaf, the bloom and backwater, exquisite as they may be in that moment, are but one bright beat in the larger rhythm of the natural world.
Given that Scott rarely picked up an artist's brush until his college years, some would say he came to the canvas late indeed. Yet in a sense, art was with him all along. One of the strongest memories of his Wyoming boyhood is visits with his grandfather, who, having been injured in a farm accident and confined to a wheelchair, gave himself over to painting. "What I remember best," Scott says, "is the smell of paint in that house." That, and the fact that some of the only times his grandfather was content was either in front of an easel or showing off his work to his grandson.
Christensen, whose paintings are now collected by people around the world, was reared in Lander, Wyoming, son of hardworking parents who passed on a strong commitment to excellence and dedication to athletic competition. In fact, Scott did not direct his focus to art until he was sidelined by a serious neck injury in college. The life as he'd known it for so long melted away like a June snow. In the year following graduation he gave up a teaching and coaching position and launched a study of the great masters of traditional art, developing through this ongoing study a solid definition of good art. Early on, for example, he was struck by how the impressionists tended to sacrifice the drawing aspect of their art in order to get just the right vibration of pigment, producing works with an uncanny degree of light and atmosphere, paintings that fairly shimmered with color.
At the same time he strove to figure out how best to incorporate those aspects of nature that would make his painting stronger, without becoming a slave to the scene by trying to put in everything, pushing beyond what a painting could bear. For guidance he turned to the works of Sir Alfred East and Edgar Payne, men who were extraordinarily inventive when it came to selecting and arranging the most important elements of a scene. "You have to make sacrifices," Scott explains. "Maybe you're standing in a place where the sky and the mountains are very dramatic; the trees have incredible color and the water is vibrant. You have to decide what you want your painting to be about, render that element most important, and then paint everything else to support it."
Christensen currently resides in Victor, Idaho where he recently completed construction on his new craftsman style studio and elegant exhibition space.
