Jane Wooster Scott

Pictures and comments of and on the artist.

"The leading exponent of American primitive painting.. . .Her own distinctive style, recreating in bright uninhibited colors, an older, simpler world .Collectors of her work include art connoisseurs and celebrities."
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE

Jane Wooster Scott,, among the world's fore most painters of American folk art, has won international acclaim with her colorful works reaching increasing numbers of admirers and collectors in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Scott who signs her canvases Wooster Scott, has expanded her horizons to Japan, Africa and Europe with exhibitions of her original oil paintings and brilliant serigraphs. Her popularity has spread to such nations as Portugal and Australia through permanent displays in American embassies as representational of American traditions. For a time one of the artist's paintings graced the walls of the White House. She has had major shows in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta and other cities across the United States.

Her paintings echo ill the hearts and minds of all cultures as she depicts in a very human way America 's celebrations of life, traditions and values. She catches moments in time in small towns, great cities, at festivals sports, politics and in family relationships -- the panoply of a young country at the turn of the last century . She commits these images beautifully and unforgettably to canvas. Her soaring imagination twice told tales, exhaustive research and trips to antique locales enable her to make the American Dream spring to life through daring brush and vivid palette

The artist, who makes her home in Sun Valley Idaho. high in the Sawtooth range of the Rockie Mountains, recently was commissioned to visit Kenya and Tanzania to paint a stunning African scene for the California Special Olympics. Her recent travels have included three tours of Japan where she showed her works in seven of that nation's largest cities. These whirlwind tours are so popular with the Japanese, a people she admires for their ancient traditions,that, incredibly all her paintings and serigraphs immediately sold. The future holds more trips to Japan to display her works.

Scott never was educated in any disciplines of formal painting techniques. It was not until after she became an adult that she decided to experiment with oils on canvas to decorated her home. Pleased with her first attempts, she created more and more works of art until friends asked to buy them, Instead, Scott chose to exhibit her paintings at a show on La Cienega Boulevard's famed "gallery row" in Los Angeles. On the first night, the gallery sold out her entire collection.

While her paintings have become increasingly sophisticated in her own instinctive techniques, the subjects, locations and activities retain their purely American folk art flavor. Scott says, "I paint the way I do and choose my subjects out of a deep love for my country's heritage . The era I choose most often is just before or just following the birth of the 'Twentieth Century. That period seems to me to have been a perfect time to live -- no wars, no pollution, no crime waves. I believe people were more honorable then. The pace was slower. More time was given to thc appreciation of life's small pleasures and the simple beauty of nature. Family units were stronger, more loving and binding. People took greater joy in living, and I try to capture that essence in my work."

The artist says it its increasingly difficult to find the United States as she imagines it was a century ago. The barns and stables, cottages and silos, Victorian Store fronts, carriages and town halls, water pumps and windmills, covered bridges and one-room school houses are disappearing from the American landscape. Scott hopes in her travels to discover remaining relics of that era and bring them to her paintings, allowing future generations to better appreciate their heritage.

"I travel to New England and southward along the Atlantic Coast, scouring the back roads and country lanes searching for the past." she.says smiling. "But even as a child I saw few enough of the remnants of that time in history."

Scott was born and reared in Pennsylvania on the edge of rural American. She attended a Quaker School near Philadelphia. Scott often includes figures in her paintings of a little girl with long dark hair, depictions of her daughter Ashley as a child, and her son Vernon IV as an active, mischievous lad. The ubiquitous white dog with the floppy ears looks a great deal like Mitzi, her favorite childhood pet.

Scott's collectors include Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas,Carol Burnett, Sylvester Stallone, Dyan Cannon, Gene Kelly, Victoria Principal and the late Henry Fonda, all of whom have sponsored her shows. Other collectors include such celebrated public figures as Governor and Mrs. John Y.  Brown of Kentucky, Aaron Spelling, Kenny Rogers, Charles Bronson, Frank Wells, David Hartman, Farrah Fawcett, Marlon Brando, William Ahmanson and the late Joseph Hirshhorn.

A Painter's Point of View
By JANE WOOSTER SCOTT

Painting to me is more then a vocation or an avocation. For me painting is a compulsion to record the life, color and beauty that I see in the world around me in terms of how it was in the past. I strive to record as much of it as possible in the hope my canvases will help perpetuate memories of a wondrous time in a great and growing country. It pleases me to think that future generations will see my work and share the fondness and pride. I hold for America at the turn of the 20th century.

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Last modified: 03/21/09
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