Scot Heywood

“I painted flat from the get-go,” says Scot Heywood, who has explored abstraction throughout the course of his artistic career. His early influences included the Abstract Expressionists, whose approach he would emulate in his own compositions. In the late 1970s, he fell in love with the paintings of Piet Mondrian; since then, he has been translating the austere philosophy of geometric abstraction into his own monochromatic works. Ranging in scale from intimate to encompassing, his paintings consist of multiple, colored canvases, connected in staggered, patchwork patterns. In a seemingly endless array of variations, he inserts thin strips between, or attaches them to the sides of, square and rectangular canvases, intentionally misaligning them to create delightfully disruptive, staccato visual rhythms. Heywood is interested in the relationship between wall, work, and viewer, and in the rich dialog between color and form.