Canadian painter Scott Pattinson was trained in architecture and urban design (University of Toronto, 2003) and although he did not pursue architecture as an artistic career, his painting subject matter continues an exploration and meditation upon urbanization and tensions between manufactured landscapes and spiritual fulfillment. For Pattinson, painting offered a more immediate creative flexibility and emotional multiplicity that architectural design could not. From his formal training however, he draws upon sculptural elements to define his painting style; often using a wide brush, thick and raucous palette, and actionable approach. A prolific painter, Pattinson’s body of work uniformly evokes the energy of his intense and conscious engagement of the moment where emotion and sensuality are built into mapped geometries of specificity and architectural endorsement.

Since 2005, Pattinson’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, with recent shows in Prince Edward County (Oeno Gallery, 2018), and a survey of the past decade’s work at Gallery Stratford (2014). While maintaining a rigorous painting and exhibition schedule, Pattinson also dedicates his time to travel which has informed his recent series’ Adrift and Pacific. In examining physical landscapes, both national and international, his work presents a vital examination of external environments that create internal reactions. Carrying on the tradition of abstract expressionism, Pattinson’s work defies a static understanding, seeking to exist in the flux of undulating realities and malleable logistics. Early series such as Rafter (2005) and Torewa (2007) show broad strategies of expression in bold lines that later culminate in the tight, twisting geometries of work such as Silence (2008-2010) and Pacific (2010-2012). In the Pacific II and Clyde House series, a new dimension of Pattinson’s work is revealed where taut intricacies and full-blown expressions of colour are replaced by a choreography of looser intonations and marks that float and stamp upon a field of white space. The Clyde House works represent an evolution in his work, backing away from hard edges and canvas boundaries, moving towards a freer, unbounded iteration.