Pierce Scantlin

Pierce Scantlin is from Alexandria, Virginia. He attended the Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA) and the New York Academy of Art. He resides and paints in an 18th-century hovel in Frederick, Maryland, with his wife, two children, two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and three birds.


Artist Statement

I work with a hunger for place and an incessant yearning for historic communion with the past. I see distant ideals and relationships within the context of art history. I invoke spiritual archetypes of an indeterminate era as guides, searching for recognition in the invention of a visual language that draws deeply from a well of shared mythologies, while also honing a precise and individual visual regulatory framework, following a personal evolution of line and color.

I am displaying my longing for the richness of a shared history and rites I may not understand, but that strike notes of familiarity. I don’t want to disappear, so my aim is to find as many points of contact within the miasma of a shared visual language as I can to anchor my thoughts. Moving through a world of uncertain outcomes, my view relative to art history and the figures of ancestral knowledge are a bulwark and a fortress. I am creating works that speak to each other, wrapping the viewer in a gauze of memory.

I am inspired by figurative exploration through deliberate archetypal retrospective styles and the evolution of abstracted and literal representation of the human form. I search for essential, idealized forms and relationships, obscuring invention and observation, using nature as a guide while working independently from it.


https://www.piercescantlin.com/