Claire Scott

The ultimate goal of my work is to trick the eye and evoke the mind. Using traditional elements of hyperrealism and surrealism, I create illusions that perplex the sense of depth within the canvas. It is a wonderful and unusual challenge to combine flat textures and imitations of 3D textures within the same painting. The immersion of opposing dimensional plains is exactly what I am confronting with my work. The ways I have achieved this so far have been playing with textures within an unexpected composition so that space becomes unfamiliar. It all began with a painting I made in 2022. I started by creating a diorama of torn up white paper. I photographed the diorama and used that image as my reference for the painting. In between the shreds of paper, I painted in very naturalistic textures such as water and clouds, in an effort to create a scene where depth is an illusion, tricking the eye. My work strives to create visuals, completely altering the reality we see on an everyday basis. I want my audience to initially be confused by my work and simultaneously figure out that every detail was painted intentionally. 

In current works I am integrating my life-long love for rendering the human form into my current theme. I am interested in combining planes that wouldn’t be seen together in the natural world within the canvas, therefore, imagining a world that is recognizable in all of my paintings. Part of what creates this perplexing, made-up world within my works is the use of hyper-realism to mimic reality so much that it tricks the eye. I created a piece in 2021 where I painted an abstract background and overlaid a realistic hand in the foreground. I painted in the shadow of the hand onto the background texture, creating an illusion of depth and trompe l'oeil. This painting brought forth questions from viewers like, “where did this arm come from?” and “what is this space or realm?” The theme of my work, no matter the subject matter, is perplexing reality and space using hyperrealism mixed with surrealism and abstraction. I want my viewers to step into the alternate world that I envisioned in my mind and brought to life in my paintings. My endeavors as an artist are to open people’s minds to view our physical existence differently than they ever have before.