By Ian P.E.
Scott Pickering is an artistic maniac. A lightning rod of creative energy – the canvas doesn’t stand a chance! It’s like Little Red Riding Hood walking through the forest…I can picture him leering at that nice little white canvas, thinking of all the ways he can eat her up. And you can see the slaughter as it happened – the process is left out in the open. It’s a weirdo manic color orgy unleashed by the inner child of a mature talent.
Identifiably individual! A Blasphanomaly of beauty! Multi-layered and musical! Like a jazz solo, only not as cliché as the simile itself. And music is the driving force behind his work, inseparable by his account – “I can’t do music without the art or art without the music”. Which, he’s also one of the hardest working musicians in the city (I once saw him sit in on drums with 3 different bands at 3 different venues – in ONE night) and plays in some of the most original bands in Cleveland, many of them following the same improvisational form that is found in his art.
A common image that recurs in his work – a dog-faced, rainbow-coated stick figure with a big-eyed smile – evokes the innocent dreams of a child…a release from the pressures of life, escapist, therapeutic, and fun. But despite the crude panache of his work, he actually places a lot of forethought into these compositions and has developed his style from many years of training.
He grew up in a family which supported him in the arts from a young age, studied art at Kent State University and much like Picasso himself, turned away from painstaking traditional renderings and began to re-imagine detailed forms back into their primitive natures…loud, savage, out of control, caveman stomps!
We had a blast hanging out with Scott at his pad in Slavic Village – it’s like Pee Wee’s playhouse, only for grown-ups…different music/sounds playing in each room, the walls ravaged with art, tricked-out to creative extremes – we didn’t leave until seven hours later…and a few excerpts from our conversations are included in the following pages. Also, the coverage here is just of the artistic sort – “Pick” does a ton of other things as well…owns a few creative companies, teaches, puts out records, plays music…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’d like to contact Scott or see more art, you can find him online at: myspace.com/revpickering
“I was a very tight renderer in the past…very classically trained. But it wasn’t fun for me. It was like washing dishes – I wasn’t getting anything out of it. It never looked perfect, and I wasn’t going to beat myself up over my inability to make it perfect. So I was like – hell with it, I’m going to do something that I get a chuckle out of later on, and maybe get different views of. I didn’t want to be reminded of the things I didn’t get quite right. I want to see the stuff that’s like – wow, how’d I do that? And it made me feel better. It allowed me to embrace my work more and also my music, where I could be more improvisational and open-minded. So I came from one extreme to the other.”
“Anyone can make a drawing that looks like a kid drawing. They can! Really!
People are like – “my kid can do that”, but putting something else into it makes the difference.”
“I get pleasure from leaving the process on the canvas. The creation of it is almost better than the result. I always try to condense it so that it’s a little bit more intense. It doesn’t get interesting until you’re under the gun. I know it sounds like a bullshit procrastinator answer. That’s not to say you haven’t been thinking about it and working it through your mind. You can do a lot of painting in your brain without ever touching the canvas…working it through your brain while you’re trying to sleep…and when you finally get to getting it down, you’re
already prepared.”
A (Parital) List of Scott Pickering’s Bands:
Maximus Warp Deaf White Kitty Juice Tokays Ragged Bags Terrible Parade Spike in Vein Prisonshake My Dad is Dead Sleazy Jesus Smoking Baloneys Gem Supie T and the Getdown Airwaves Speaker / Cranker Burning Lesbians Terminal Lovers Rainy Day Saints CHUMP Flat Can Company Scarcity of Tanks Pufftube Clouds Forming Crowns Mohammed Cartoon Ear Control / Black Wolf Puffy Areolas
