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THREE NOTES ON GUESSWORK

1

Scrawled lines on a wall somewhere remind Scott of a kind-of-rainbow, but not as distinct as a rainbow—that’s just a way of telling me what he’d seen. And if it wasn’t for me asking the question, the lines might not have been turned into the word. When something catches your eye on the street and you notice, but walk on, then remember it, and it wasn’t worth taking a picture of at the time, but you then wish you had, because now you’re trying to recall it, with a brush and paint. Such is the studio life of this painter. Remembering and forgetting, and in trying to recall, doing that distinct painting thing, inventing.

2

If you can take an image from the mind’s eye, or an image of what you see in the real world, and get it from your mind onto your canvas, then you can own it, at least for a while. We discussed this last time I visited the studio—painting the things you want into existence… This could be a mantra for Scott. But something undercuts his capturing, for here is a painter who has one hand on the brush and the other on the edge of the rug he’s about to whip out from underneath himself. It’s sabotage, if not for the fact that it’s a deliberate strategy towards new ends. Whilst that slippery recollection of what we’re calling a rainbow, is coming together, and the form is indeed reminding him of that brief glimpse, he stops mid-stroke, stops short of a recreation of the memory. Because this is a painting and not a memory, he reminds himself. 

3

Capture. Copy. Distract. Stop. Repeat, but do it differently. These paintings are built of curtailed attempts. Scott paints with provisionality, not so much as in the provisional painting that surfaced around the 2000s that looks unfinished (even when finished). Instead these are arrangements of unfinished things that are made to interlock, overlap, and finish with each other. What’s left is an aggregated, choreographed assortment of provisional moves, that each give way to the greater good of the whole and become beautifully bound together in small rectangles.

For Scott McCracken’s solo exhibition Guesswork, at Thames-Side Gallery, January 2024