STRAIGHT TALK

with Scott McIntire

Photo credit: Alexander Lotz Photography.

Scott McIntire is a Long Islandbased painter who is concerned with the unseen forces
in nature. Utilizing his background in car painting and textiles, McIntire creates juxtapositions between the natural and the manmade, the hyperreal and the abstract, the
seen and the unseen. McIntire earned his degrees from Portland State University and
the Art Center College of Design in California. McIntire is represented by Peter Marcelle Projects gallery, Art Sites, Kenneth Paul Lesko gallery, and SciArt Center. He has
exhibited widely including shows at the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum,
the Denver Art Museum, Museo do Arte e Historia in Puerto Rico, and in numerous
galleries throughout the United States.

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SciArt Magazine December 2016

Pole #25 (2013). 18 x 24. Enamel on canvas.

Image courtesy of the artist.

By Danielle McCloskey
Contributor
DM: Give us some background on yourself: how did you
end up making wild colored, surrealist style enamel
paintings of larger than life animals, energy fields,
abstract shapes, and unreal environments?
SM: For most of my life I pursued two paths at the
same time, one as a commercial artist and the other as
a fine artist. In my late teens I started out doing custom car painting, thats how I came to embrace Enamel
paint, which was oilbased then but has changed to
water. After graduating from college I was making a living and honing my skills doing commercial projects and
at the same time showing in galleries and museums. I
worked as an art director for a Portland ad agency until
I left to work as a freelance designer and illustrator,
creating over 100 posters for various events and groups
in Portland and at the same time establishing my fine
art painting career and often showing in the Portland

SciArt Magazine December 2016

Art Museum Oregon Annual exhibitions. This led

to gallery exhibitions in Portland, Seattle, Denver, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles. During that period I was
also teaching special drawing at the Pacific Northwest
College of Art.
I left Portland in the mid 80s to manage a design
studio in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico for six years before
moving the studio to New York City. While in Puerto
Rice I began a series of real and surreal paintings of San
Juan building details and environmental icons of the
island. 40 of these paintings were shown at the Museo
de Arte e Historia, three of them at the Ponce Art Museum, and others in island galleries.
In New York City, I begin working in surface design
patterns and left a couple years later to freelance in fabric design. The studio was on the 13th floor in midtown
Manhattan and I began a series of realistic skyline paintings that slowly focused in on a larger series of iconic
rooftop water tanks. As a break from the tedium of

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Island in Greenport, New York. The

farming environment there is similar
to where I grew up in Oregons Willamette Valley. This area provides me
with a familiar close relationship to
nature, to rich soil, and to a large variety of wildlife. As soon as we moved
in I begin gardening, moving plants,
and sculpting my backyard. This became another creative endeavor and
in the process I started noticing the
wildlife up close.
While working in my yard I would
receive cell phone calls and that
simple act started me thinking about
the cellular energy I was surrounded
by. I begin thinking about the different sources of energy that were
around like telephone polls, cellular
towers, cable networks, and the wind
turbine next door and realized that
they projected different types of energy and had different energy signatures. That led me to try to paint the
different types of unseen and unfelt
energy forces that were being sent
through the air.
DM: The study of auras and energy
viewing is considered by some to be a
pseudoscience. What are your views
on this? Have you done any research
into it yourself?
SM: While I appreciate the American Indians spiritual connection
The Delusion of Quixote (2008). 60 x 48. Enamel on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
to sky, land, plants, and animals, I
stay away these spiritual implicarealism and creating fabric designs I started in a totally
tions. The term aura is too loaded for me and is contrary
different direction with a group of abstracted portrait
to what I am interested in showing. When I look at a
paintings which were shown at the Morgan Rank Gallery flower and the insects are coming and going Im not obin East Hampton. This brought about another group of
serving a spiritual bonding between them, instead I am
paintings centering on thick black silhouettes of crows
aware of the smells, colors, and forces that attract them.
in fields of color and surrounded by various shapes and
I sense something is going on at the microbial level, but
marks. I left the studio in 2006 to pursue painting full
more than that the connectedness amongst all living
time and my work has evolved from both my comthings: the unseen mutuality of life forces.
mercial and fine art styles and materials. This direction
slowly morphed into my current Energy Field paintDM: Can you explain some of the repeating visual eleings.
ments in your work? What do some of them represent?
DM: In your newest, most comprehensive series, you
aim to depict the energy of things. How did you come
to visualize the unseen auras of nature?
SM: My interest in the energy of things all started with
a cell phone call. For the past 20 years, my wife and I
have had a second home on the northeast end of Long

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SM: Most of the concentric circles represent the vibrations in space; I prefer to think of what they might look
like as they come towards the viewer. Once in a while
I will do a twodimensional sound print of a bird call
in a background but mostly I like to use these expanding concentric circles to convey the elements of sound,
equating color to tone, line thickness to rhythm, and

SciArt Magazine December 2016

Orange Bluet on
Bittersweet (2014).
19 x 23.5. Enamel on
birch plywood. Image
courtesy of the artist.

color relationships to harmony. For a short period in

my early career I created a series of Op art paintings
that taught me the power of color vibration. By placing two colors side by side that are opposite each other
on the color wheel and have the same value, you create
a situation that is hard for the eyes retina to focus on
simultaneously. This is because of the intersection of
different spectral wavelengths. I like to use this phenomenon in my circles to create an actual visual vibration. I
also use the circles to give a headon representation of
other forms of energy such as radio waves and cellular
transmissions. Sometimes I will use different swirling
patterns to visualize energy or sometimes I will just use
fields of various colored dots of opposing colors. This
way I can give different energy signatures to the field
around my subject.
DM: An element that repeats only in one series of your
work Dark Energy Fields is your incorporation of vines
throughout each painting. What do those represent?
SM: In the dark energy series I have to clarify that I am
referring to the darkness of light and not to the forces
that exist in space. The vine I use is called Bittersweet
it is an invasive vine that climbs up and chokes trees,
and drops its yellow and red berries in the fall to start
the process again. I am not making a statement about

SciArt Magazine December 2016

what this vine does but about how it looks as it does it.
I collect the dried vines at the end of the season when
the tips are finished searching for footing. At this point
they make these great calligraphic statements as they
overlap themselves and other vines and than search out
into space looking for something to curl around before
retuning. Its about the beauty of the line as this vine
travels in the sky.
This series has progressed in two directions. The first
were small paintings of flowers found in the garden juxtaposed against the vine/line of the Bittersweet and that
often include small insects. In the second series I concentrate on the overlapping of the vines and the resulting pattern createdand if youre lucky you will find an
insect or two.
DM: You stress the importance of color and your use of
it. How do you choose your colors in a piece? Do certain
colors have certain significance?
SM: We are going to move away from science a bit
and talk about the process of painting. When I painted
straight realism it was almost like starting at one corner and filling in to the opposite corner, the outcome
was predetermined. Now my paintings begin with a
background of whatever color speaks to me that day.
Often I put in some preliminary marks and shapes when

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Backyard Weeds & Seeds (2015). 14 x 36. Enamel on canvas.

Image courtesy of the artist.

painting the background/environment. Next comes the

placement of the main object or objects. After that I
put in additional colors, marks, and energy signatures in
an intuitive manner letting the work grow on its own.
This way I get away from the figure/ground relationship
of landscape painting and move into my own personal
interpretation and coloration of the environment.
Color bars are one of my favorite elements and often
reappear in my work. They come from my past fabric design experience that required color tabs for the printer
to color match when producing the fabric. Sometimes
I liked the tabs better than the designs. Now I put the
color bars into my paintings as a way to emphasize the
importance of color as a subject. Certain colors dont
have a particular significance to meits more about the
harmonious combination of hues and tones.
DM: Although youve moved away from a typical backdrop, using space as an abstract visual narrative rather
than a traditional background, you do use a lot of unconventional, modern structures in your paintings (water
towers, telephone poles, windmills, garages, etc). What
draws you to that subject matter?
SM: The structures painted are often undernoticed
items that help facilitate our infrastructure. I find
beauty in these manmade objects and like to visually investigate how light and shadow delineate their surfaces.
As I moved into the Energy Field series it seemed only
natural to memorialize the actual conveyors of energy
such as telephone transformers, power polls, and cell
towers.
The windmill painting Delusion of Quixote is a predecessor to the Energy Field series and one of a few works
where I was thinking about affective energy, the world
of human feelings: in this case, the dissociative dreams
of Don Quixote as he activates his passion and energy to

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do battle against the imagined forces.

DM: For your BioArt series, what types of animals
were you drawn to when you began it?
SM: My biology knowledge is selftaught through observation, study, and recording of elements in whatever
environment I visit. After moving to Long Island I began
photographing the wildlife in my garden and was blown
away by the volume and variety. In 2012 I decided to
photograph all the mammals, birds, and insects I could
find in my backyard during the calendar year of 2013 and
produce a book recording these findings. So far I have
over 265 animals and I am still photographing new finds
all the time. This project was initiated because I felt it
was imperative to document this period of environmental change and also to witness my yards loss of Red Fox,
Box Turtle, Bobwhites, or Rosebreasted Grosbeaks.
These photos became the source material for my BioArt series. The main subjects of these paintings are
mostly the flora and fauna found in my backyard. These
memorialized plants and animals have become another
form of documentation of the change happening to this
quarter acre of land over a 15 to 20 year period of time.
DM: Are you planning any new series or any expansions
on your current ones?
SM: Expanding in multiple directions at the same time
is definitely in my plans. The BioArt paintings are
progressing as I find more interesting subjects to explore
and different energy sources such as magnetic fields and
neutrinos to expand upon. My newest paintings titled
AIR 1, AIR 2, and AIR 3 are energy field studies with
Bittersweet punctuating the space. These paintings give
me the opportunity to explore a more abstract statement through realism. They will be part of my next show
at the Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery in Cleveland.

SciArt Magazine December 2016

Three Grasses
(2015). 9.625 x
9.625. Enamel on
pine. Image courtesy of the artist.

Black Tulip &

Mason Wasp
(2013). 24 x 24.
Enamel on canvas.
Image courtesy of
the artist.

SciArt Magazine December 2016

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