Patrick Scott

Patrick Scott was born in County Cork and held his first one-man show in Dublin in 1944. He worked primarily as an architect until 1960, when he became a full-time painter. It was about this time that representation gave way to abstraction in his work and he developed a highly sophisticated graphic style of painting which has persisted in various forms un to the present. During the early sixties he painted a series of bog paintings. These managed to capture the elusive light which characterises Irish bog land by use of an innovative staining technique using tempera paint on unprimed canvas. These paintings were widely acclaimed and gained him the Guggenheim International Award in New York in 1960. Later he developed his "device" series based on the image of a sphere which appears to explode in a controlled manner on the canvas, many of which were in the form of diptychs. In the mid-sixties he began his gold paintings which involved the precise application of flat geometric shapes, particular triangles and circles, in gold leaf onto a neutral background. Apart from his painting, Scott is also highly regarded as a designer of tapestries and carpets.