"A Critical Essay on the Paintings of Scott Avett,"
by Tom Schulz of Empathinc.

This piece is excerpted from an essay that originally appeared on Empathinc. Gallery's website, in conjunction with an early exhibit of Avett's art. In his role as curator for this 2012 event, Schulz notes that, “while Avett has thematically shifted from the complicated to the complex, familiar themes of isolation and the transitory remain perceptible in this recent work."


...In Scott’s paintings, there is a sense of this wandering, of this loneliness. There is a sense in his portraits that these characters may be on the brink of losing it all. That any work would only be temporary.

Meticulously painted, and washed with what could be perceived to be a Mediterranean light, it would be simple to compare Avett’s work with Caravvagio. But this is not simple work. While it is impossible to escape the whole history of painting (both when making and critiquing painting), there is a sense that the language of that same history is somehow inadequate to fully understand what is going on here. As the hobos did (and still very much do), Avett travels through various regions of art making and carries the gleaned stories and the songs from camp to camp. There is restlessness here. Not content to follow what has become the traditional path for painters (akin to the modern freeway – focus on the way to the exclusion of all exits), he takes side roads. And while this is not required knowledge for a proper reading of his paintings, it is necessary to a more complete understanding of his art.

Scott is a member of The Avett Brothers, a trio of musicians that work out of Concord, North Carolina. I have listened to recordings of their music, which could easily be labeled as bluegrass, as country. But as with his paintings, a simple determination of association becomes limiting. And this is where the linkage between his chosen art forms becomes more about how an individualized artistic voice may have to contain many dialects; nuances that only a hobo might be able to collect.

Scott Avett is an artistic hobo.

Once I realized that his music was couched more in the terms of the social and cultural upheavals of the American Depression and less and less about conventional and contemporary musical genres, then something unfolded – a map drawn with spit and coal on the back of a discarded napkin. This was all the information needed to grasp that if there was a connection with Avett’s work and another painter (and there is, there always is), then it would be the painter Thomas Hart Benton. This is not about style, but about methods of motivation. Benton was a narrative painter, his distorted figures and landscapes accurate in the depiction of a uniquely American energy. As accurate as the written conjuring of Steinbeck, Dos Passos, B. Traven.

As I view these paintings, I gather the impression that there is a fine layer of dust settled on the arms and necks of the subjects. That there is a layer of grime on the canvas and the stretcher bars. And this is not the dust of an old master (however competent these paintings are). No, this is the grit that gets behind your eyelids when you have had too many nights by the side of the road. Squinted too long at the bleak horizon. This is a specific chronicling of a journey, raw and unkempt.

And it may require a blended vernacular of brush and guitar. Oil and notes. Scott Avett’s painting is not diminished by his efforts in being a musician. And it is also not just informed by the music. Scott Avett actually requires this multi-faceted voice to capture a subject that, after all then, becomes as big as all of outdoors, and as long as the lonesome highway.

Source: Empathinc. Archives, 2004