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Obituary    -by Frank Ruhrmund

05 October 2006

It is no exaggeration to say that everyone who knew him, from his family and friends to his fellow artists and members of the art world at large, was shocked and saddened by the death, following a relatively short illness, at his home in Penzance last Wednesday of 65-year-old Colin Scott. An artist who, as James Bond's creator Ian Fleming once described the horse, was "dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle", he always worked without benefit of a safety net.

If there was a single unifying element in the many exhibitions he held then it was an ever-present risk factor.

Born and bred in Sunderland. he attended the city's College of Art and Design and it was there that he first met Patricia, then a fellow student and long since an accomplished artist in her own right.
She would become his wife and mother of their two children, Adam and Tamsyn.

Subsequent to his graduation he taught art, while pursuing his own work, on his home patch for a few years before moving south to become an 'East Ender', living, teaching and painting, in that part of the capital.

That was until 32 years ago when he gave up full-time teaching to travel to Cornwall and settle in Penzance.

The move coincided with the showing of his work on either side of the Atlantic, from the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery in London to the Mitch Morse Gallery in New York.

It also set him on the road to Europe, where he later exhibited from the Kunstlerhaus, Cuxhaven, to the Gallerie Kunstkeizer, Amsterdam.

Fortunately, as his multitude of former students in West Cornwall will be the first to agree, it was not long before he returned to teaching on a part-time basis as a lecturer at both Falmouth College of Art and at the Penzance School of Art.

It was at the latter establishment that he made his mark.

Although only a part-time member of its staff, during the 17 years he was there he became the school's 'uncrowned head' with his teaching methods, his encouragement and enthusiasm.

Indeed, it says much for his prowess, not to say brilliance, as a teacher that several of his former students are now themselves working as professional artists.

Then, too, it was Colin Scott's belief in the importance and worth of the venerable Penzance School of Art that were key factors in raising its standards and placing the school firmly on the art maps of both county and country.

He was a prolific painter who liked having several paintings on the go at the same time.

But when he was not working in his large studio in the town or in his smaller studio at home, he somehow always managed to find time and energy for others.

As well as teaching at Penzance School of Art, for several years he was the driving spirit behind the town's Victoria Studios, and until recently also encouraged the members of Penzance Arts Club, whose committee he served on, to exhibit in the series of one-person shows he organised in the club's Foyer Gallery.

An exhibition of his held at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, in the early 1990s was entitled Body and Soul, and there is no doubting the fact that he devoted both his body and soul to his art.

It was only last May, when involved in mounting a three-person exhibition with colleagues Caroline Hone and Rod Walker in the gallery of the St Ives Society of Artists, that he learned of the sudden death in France, at the age of 60, of his brother and fellow artist Eric Scott.

Never a follower of fashion but always fiercely individual, he once said he took pride in "the privilege of painting what I want to paint".

Whether working on a small watercolour or on a large oil, everything he did received his best shot.

While he lived dangerously within his art, he not only pursued but also captured what he called "something worthwhile" in his paintings.

Although nude human figures are often central to his compositions, they are neither nude studies nor portraits.

The people he portrays have no personalities and are, for the most part, faceless androgynous forms whose gender is far from being their only ambiguous feature.

Ambiguities, in fact, abound in Colin Scott's compositions.

Perhaps even more interested in the physical activity of making a painting than he was in the painting's final appearance, he produced a vast body of work in which compassion and challenge, light and dark, the ethereal and the solid, the erotic and the asexual come face to face and spar for supremacy.

Essays in rich colour, often as scarlet and seductive as sin itself, the stories they tell - and they can be read or interpreted in all manner of ways - have their origin in the relatively unexplored region which lies somewhere between the tropics of fact and fiction, the torrid zone of the human condition.

As mean and moody as they are magnificent, his paintings, in which his figures might be said to be married in unholy wedlock to reassurance and relationships, compassion and comedy, for better rather than worse, are as compelling as the artist himself was committed to his art, as uncompromising as he was unflinching.

His friend and fellow artist Rod Walker said he always remained "his own man".

To say that Colin Scott will be missed is an understatement.

Watched over by one of his compelling paintings, people and his favourite music - including bagpipes and the New Orleans funeral march - filled the chapel yesterday at Penmount Crematorium, Truro, for his funeral service.

Tributes were paid to him by members of his family, his friends and fellow artists Caroline Hone, Brendan McVey, Julian Moore, Rod Walker, Stella Wood and Peter Woodcraft, while Simon Uren read a poem especially for Colin's wife Pat.

Surrounded by a considerable collection of his paintings, and with his favourite food and drink on the menu, a wake was held later in Penzance Arts Club to say thank-you to Colin Scott for being the man he was.