Scott Prior
Born 1949, Exeter, NH, lives and works in Northampton, MA
Nellie in the Backyard, 1993–1999, oil on linen, Museum Purchase, 1999.25
Scott Prior's paintings exude qualities that include contentment, beauty, tranquility, timelessness, solitude, and wistfulness. Choosing subject matter from his own life—portraits of his wife and children, images of their home, local landscapes—the artist has shown a remarkable ability to transform the personal into the universal. Evident from his detailed and focused work, Prior studied paintings of the Flemish Renaissance partly because "the obvious obsessive attention to detail imbued all subject matter, no matter how banal, with a sense of importance."
In many of his paintings Prior places the figure in outdoor settings where the contrast between the nude figure and a lush landscape can be jarring. Nellie in the Backyard features his daughter standing in the middle of a grassy field cast with long shadows, her hair glowing in the fading sunlight. This painting is startling because it is devoid of context; Nellie could be a child from any time and this could be any field. In this magical painting, Nellie is both an innocent and a demon, symbolic of humankind's dual nature. Nellie in the Backyard was purchased at the time of DeCordova’s 1999 exhibition, Light on the Familiar: The Paintings of Scott Prior.
