Michael Scott was born in 1952 in Lawrence, Kansas, and lived much of his life in the Midwest. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 and his MFA from the University of Cincinnati in 1978. Beginning in the late 1970s, Scott has shown extensively throughout the United States. His paintings are in numerous corporate and public collections, including the Cincinnati Art Museum; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; the Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN; the J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; Southern Ohio Museum of Art, Portsmouth, OH; and the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock. In 2003, Scott designed a home and studio in Santa Fe, where he currently resides.
Michael Scott, who is now living and working outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, has created a stunning set of 31 paintings that explore the life of the nineteenth-century Western painter of Indian Scenes, Henry Farny, as well as seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and portraiture traditions, Rembrandt, nineteenth-century European and American trompe l’oiel painting, van Gogh, and oh-so-many other intersections in Art History. Accompanying the exhibition is Scott’s written narrative, a complex, funny story involving anthropomorphized barnyard fowl, cowboys in the guise of Rembrandt’s portraits, Indians lifted from Farny’s paintings, playing cards, magic, and baking, all revolving around the annual Railyard Santa Fe County Fair. The exhibition opens at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio (Henry Farny’s hometown) before traveling to the Nic, and then to the Gerald Peters gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The setting of Farny Fables is the County Fair, held annually in the Santa Fe rail yard. A much-beloved Grandmother who over the years has always won Best of Show for her delicious cakes learns that her friend, the painter Henry Farny, may just beat her out this time. Her rooster friends learn that a cadre of Dutch Cowboys, whom Scott has lifted from Rembrandt paintings, has succeeded, through devious and supernatural means, in making off with Grandmother’s special MoonPie cake recipe. The Cowboys secretly dispatch the prize recipe to Farny, concocting a scheme to make his painting triumph over her cake, thus inflating the market value of his work and making buckets of money on the back of his imminent fame.
As things unfold, Grandma channels Van Gogh’s spirit, who takes the form of a trickster-like apparition called El Bubble. Along with a group of 4 Indians, Van Gogh will play the roll of the spoiler. Van Gogh’s art is the record of a deeply lived means of spiritual deliverance, a quest for the transformation of the self. Irises, essentially unknown in Van Gogh’s lifetime, is a powerful metaphor for the troubling and fundamental distinction between worth and value, and serves as Scott’s grail for an extended meditation on this dichotomy.
In his narrative, Scott has the trickster Vincent/ El Bubble remind his two roosters, “the ‘wealth’ they seek [in cahoots with the cowboys] is ‘in the cards’ and the path to it can be found in painting, baking, and other creative endeavors that bring joy.” Ah joy, that fleeting thing. In these visually complex and multivalent paintings and their attendant story, Scott asks us: Why does art matter? What is the relationship between art and happiness, between discovery and joy, between seeing and becoming? Scott explores the parallels between seeing, art-making, cooking and joy. But who is Henry Farny?
Born just six years earlier than Van Gogh, Henry Farny (1847-1916) was in his time a highly regarded and commercially successful painter of sympathetic, realistic scenes of American Indian life and of romantic Western landscapes. Farny was born in France but grew up in Ohio, establishing a popular studio in Cincinnati, where Scott himself maintained a studio until he moved to Santa Fe. In Scott’s paintings and story, Farny stands for the vexing alliance between art and commerce, the relationship between meaning and significance in our lives.
Born just six years earlier than Van Gogh, Henry Farny (1847-1916) was in his time a highly regarded and commercially successful painter of sympathetic, realistic scenes of American Indian life and of romantic Western landscapes. Farny was born in France but grew up in Ohio, establishing a popular studio in Cincinnati, where Scott himself maintained a studio until he moved to Santa Fe. In Scott’s paintings and story, Farny stands for the vexing alliance between art and commerce, the relationship between meaning and significance in our lives.
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