Palimpsest by Scott Nicol

From Scott Nicol:

Palimpsest is process, in my art and in art history. For the ancient Greeks it meant writing on wax tablets, then heating the wax to erase the words before writing something else, with traces of old texts at times visible beneath the new layers. In my artistic practice drawings are layered like sediments in a river delta, images coming to rest one atop another, some rising to the surface, some buried. Forms drawn in graphite or Conté crayon on a sheet of drafting vellum come about organically, spontaneous marks giving rise to images without a predetermined idea of the ultimate outcome. One page is filled, set aside, and a new one is started. Over time (months, even years) a stack of drawn forms accumulates, and these are spread on the ground, the transparency of the paper allowing one to be seen through another, creating unanticipated correspondences and relationships. Bathed in beeswax on a panel of birch they are bound together and enlivened.

Though imagery and form are not predetermined, things that resemble bits of the natural world – bones and beaks, tendons and claws, to my eye – work their way onto the page. Anatomical structures, the necessary scaffolding on which bodies are built, assert themselves. They are neither literal nor intentional, but it would be dishonest to deny them. My interest is in movement, the wind that bends the branch and shapes the tree, not the wood. Mondrian painted the same tree again and again and again, obliterating all that might be recognized as “tree” in search of something ineffable. I see myself seeking something similar, but I suppose I still need the pieces, which over time have become more detailed and referential in my drawings. What interests me when I step back is not what they are, what thing they resemble, but what they are doing, verb rather than noun. Anatomy allows for animation: running, dancing, flying, rising through layers of vellum and wax.

Artist Bio:

The impetus for Scott Nicol’s artistic practice arose from time spent in the rainforests of Venezuela and Ecuador while an undergraduate student at Austin College. During graduate studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio he built upon this experience, traveling to the desert of southern Utah and the lowland rainforest of Costa Rica to construct work intimately bound to those ecosystems. Upon receiving his MFA he taught college summer courses at the La Suerte Biological Field Station in Costa Rica and the Ometepe Biological Field Station in Nicaragua. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas.