Desert Dionysian Painting

Iris Scott (b.1984) grew up in Maple Valley, Washington on what she describes as a “one-family hippie commune”. She and her sister spent evenings listening to their mother, a writer, tell epic tales about the anthropomorphized lives of the family’s pet parrots, lizards, cats, goats, and rabbits—with wild coyotes appearing in the stories as special guest stars. Iris’ father, a custom cabinet maker, worked in a shop attached to the house, and Iris absorbed how a woodworker manifests their ideas with their hands. Iris continues the family’s storytelling tradition of magical realism, like her mother, and emulates her father by building the worlds she imagines with her hands. Scott’s college years were spent in Florence, in the same centuries-old halls where Raphael, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci worked. In her mid twenties Iris moved to a tiny apartment overlooking a rainforest outside of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. There she stumbled upon finger painting when a serendipitous lack of clean brushes prompted her to finish a painting with her fingertips. In that moment she recognized how fingers could scoop oil paint better than brushes, and overnight she committed to leaving her brushes behind. Scott worked exclusively as an oil finger painter from 2010 to 2020. The artist now blends all techniques when she paints, incorporating anything from brushes to palette knives. Recently Iris has begun diving into another tool of mark-making: high pressure air. Look for new cellular patterns in her work, these unique marks are another invention of hers which she calls “air painting.”