Scott Cressman

My practice examines the relationship between abstraction, visual language, pattern, and perception. Working across painting, drawing, illustration, and photography, I am interested in how images can move between recognition and ambiguity, and how repeated forms can accumulate into larger systems of visual meaning.

My current paintings are rooted in biomorphic abstraction and the modernist tradition of invented form. They draw on the visual vocabularies developed by artists such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee, whose use of symbolic, organic, and quasi-figurative forms expanded the possibilities of abstraction beyond geometry. The work also reflects the legacy of Surrealist automatism, particularly its interest in intuitive mark-making and the emergence of imagery through processes that resist fixed narrative or predetermined representation.

At the same time, the paintings engage the graphic immediacy of Pop and Neo-Pop, as well as the dense visual languages associated with psychedelic art, street culture, and contemporary maximalism. Bold black contours, saturated colour, repetition, and compressed compositions create surfaces that are deliberately excessive rather than reductive. In this respect, the work operates in opposition to m...

BDes, Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary, Canada