Reuben Scott: Highly Skilled

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Reuben Scott, "A Topical Conversation About Litter," 2021

UV screen print, 22” x 27.5”

Reuben Scott presents a selection of paintings and screen prints informed by his experiences seeing and feeling a variety of conditions in the daily human experience. In Highly Skilled, Scott depicts situations of everyday scenes, such as hitchhikers waiting for a ride, blue-collar workers taking out the trash, or convicts obligated to do community service; scenes that are typically not artistically thought-provoking on the surface and brings them to life in a cartoony realm to unearth trace amounts of humour lying underneath an average perception of ordinary experiences.

Scott’s artistic practice originates in the cartoon world. At an early age, he was inspired by the works of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, and Jim Davis’ Garfield. He observed the art style of these newspaper cartoonists on how they drew, the ideas they conveyed, and replicated their work to the best of his ability. The subsequent exposure over the years to Dav Pilkey’s book series Captain Underpants and most recently the diverse cartoons in The New Yorker Magazine helped refine Scott’s work up until his foray into a formal education in visual arts.

It is what led him to choose painting and screen printing as the mediums to express himself. The ability to achieve a cartoon-like quality with acrylic paint, and the possibilities to play with large scale presents a playful profoundness that has resonated with Scott. In addition, he found the technical process of screen printing immersive in allowing for the production of multiple originals. The medium’s ability to be displayed in many places at once shares the essence of the distribution of cartoons in print media.

Scott’s paintings and prints are his reactions to events he sees daily. Like many of his artistic peers, it is common that they work non-art inspiring day jobs (typically in the service industry) to subsidize their art education or artistic practice. It takes away from the time and energy needed for being motivated to make art. Scott repurposes some of this energy used in his side-job and its crude workplace culture into the humorous messaging of his paintings. He likes to find humour in places people would least expect it.