Meditation Painting 28

Patrick Scott studied architecture at University College Dublin. He went on to work with the architect Michael Scott and as a graphic designer with Signa Design Consultancy. Scott painted in his spare time and, while still a student, exhibited with the avant-garde White Stag Group. In 1960 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. The same year he won a National Prize at the Guggenheim International Award and turned to painting full-time. Scott is now recognised as one of the first exponents of pure abstraction in Irish art and a significant contributor to the development of modernist design in Ireland. He was elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 2007. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1982) and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2002). 'Patrick Scott: Image Space Light', presently on display at IMMA and VISUAL, Carlow, brings together the most comprehensive representation of this remarkable artist’s 75 year long career. Scott's love of gold ground was fostered on journeys to Venice and Ravenna in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Arguably his signature expression, his Gold paintings are an absolutely modern revivifying of the art of formalistic meditative sign. Like the stylised ancient arts of the East or the art of the Eastern Orthodox icon makers, the spare elegance and symmetry of his Gold paintings lends to limitless repetition and renewal within a set of invariable rules. Following his journeys to the Far East during the 1980s, Scott's later Gold paintings became more explicitly concerned with an Eastern aesthetic. 'Meditation Painting', as its title suggests, encourages the viewer to contemplate the link between the physical and metaphysical world.