Scotty Mitchell

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My art springs from my love of the natural world, looking with wonder at its rhythms and flow, shapes responding to one another, colors blaring one moment and singing softly the next.I give my love and attention and nature answers back.

I’m looking to convey the land’s spirit, its numinosity, how I perceive it and what amazes me, while at the same time creating a piece of art that is more than the landscape, which can be enjoyed on many levels, both representational and abstract.

      I’ve been a landscape painter my whole adult life. I love the immediacy of drawing right there with my  subject. Landscape painting for me is very specific. I am celebrating not a tree, but that tree with that branch that twists just so, like no other, that is relating to that exact rock or that shadow pattern just at that specific time. As time passing effects change minute by minute, I need to be right in the moment, on my toes, and this gives an energetic edge to the work.

     I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Italy, and went briefly to The Studio School in New york City. In my mid twenties, wanting to go back to Europe and paint on site, I set out on what turned into  a twenty year stay on the island of Crete in Greece. Crete afforded wonderful landscapes, mountains and sea, cultivated and wild. Then in the mid nineties, captivated by the magnificent landscape in Southern Utah, my ex husband and I decided to move to the little town of Boulder, Utah set on the edge of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. In Greece I had mostly painted oils, but the landscape in Utah seemed to call for pastels, and I became primarily a pastel painter. Armed with pastels easel and drawing board I wandered in the high desert country drawing the bones of the land, red rock canyons, twisted junipers, cream colored slickrock like waves in the sea, and huge skies with wonderful clouds! After 20 years in Utah I decided to move here to Arroyo Seco, near Taos last year.

    Painting on site, being totally absorbed with my subject, is my way of creating, connecting to nature and to my soul. For me, being present with my subject, is the best way to capture its vitality and spirit. My pastels are a celebration of visual delights .I hope my landscape paintings offer a new window to view the natural world with, perhaps offering a fresh relationship and greater appreciation.

My Open Studio Tour: https://youtu.be/E5UbgoxMIf4
3 minute video.
I show in my studio by appointment. Please call: (575) 776-2119 (landline)