spencer

Male

Los Angeles, California

Born 1970. (American abstract painter)

Living in Los Angeles, California, Scott Spencer loves to listen to music while he paints. "Classical music is great for the more cerebral pieces and good old rock and roll works best when I want to let the paint fly." Spencer takes inspiration from his immediate surroundings, real or imagined, and paints into the wee hours of the night. "That's when the energy comes." He began painting full time after a brush with cancer in 1999. Spencer is represented by renowned gallerist and art dealer Biljana Grcic-Beran through Galeria Jan in La Jolla, California, and was admitted into the Pasadena Society of Artists in 2004.

Artist Statements: Life is a game. Play along.

In the Grand Scheme of it all, we may very well be experiencing different realities.

These are definitely wacky times. We live in an age of orange newscasters and Burger King memorabilia.

I stepped off the deep end a long time ago and have been dog paddling for dear life ever since.

Nobody taught me to run from my problems. I had to learn that one on my own.

I give myself over to That Which Governs. I know Someone or Something is watching after me, keeping vigil.

Every day I thank my lucky stars and the Powers That Be that there are art collectors in this world. "Thank you," to everyone who owns and all future owners of these paintings. You are wonderful people, allowing me to continue painting and giving me great satisfaction. If you're ever in Los Angeles, please look me up. I'll buy you some lunch. I'd like to get to know you.

Every canvas has an agenda--a life of its own separate from its maker, separate from thought or logic or reason--and to plot its course is only to interfere. To plan is to destroy. Let it paint. Trust the mess. All marks are good.

Oh, but the mutiny of scrutiny . . . if we could only leave it alone.

The self-taught artist has a great chance to be unique. Without knowledge of "rules" to hinder the hand or an instructor's style to imitate, what results is pure, entirely his own.

Contrary to popular belief, abstract art is "meaningful" on a parallel with representational art. Each of us sees differently, and individual responses to an abstract work of art are varied. An abstract work's "meaning" is oftentimes stronger and more personal for the viewer than it is in purely representational art where the subject matter is obvious and can only evoke a limited range of emotions.

Nowhere else in this existence have I found the freedom and exhilaration that oil painting affords.

Albert Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Welcome words to a daydreamer like me.

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Francis Bacon

Being gay is a gift, a variation on a theme. Love is too powerful to be shaped or confined.

At the moment, I'm loving the paintings of Cecily Brown, Raimonds Staprans and Paul Balmer. My all-time favorites are Max Beckmann, Milton Avery, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Joan Mitchell, Egon Schiele, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler and Lucien Freud.