XIV/L, 1974

Purchased Albright-Knox Art Rental Services, Buffalo, New York Private Collection, Ontario

Michael Tooby and Simon Morley William Scott, Paintings and Drawings, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Merrell, London and New York, 2004, pg. 24

Simon Morley writing about William Scott, “He juxtaposes his forms so that they seem to be involved in transactions of some kind, as they are brought together in the space of his paintings and sometimes seem to pass beyond the edges. They interact, suggesting relationships of dominance and submission, comradeship and belligerence.” William Scott was born in Greenock Scotland in 1913, in 1924 the family moved to Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. He enrolled at the Belfast School of Art in 1928 and three years later moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools. After time in the army Scott took up a teaching post at the Bath Academy of Art, at Corsham Court in Wiltshire. A trip to New York in 1953 exposed him to the abstract expressionist movement, he befriended Mark Rothko and Willem De Kooning this time in New York and exposure to these two artists would greatly affect his work. From the series of fifty gouaches that were included with the book William Scott: drawings, edited by Lou Klepac, this small intimate work possesses Scott’s distinctive focus on space, form, and colour. He has repeated shapes that can be found in his larger canvases from the 1970’s, the frying pan shape in white and small black cup on a neutral ground. The year before these gouaches were created Hilton Kramer called him “the best painter of his generation in England.”