Diamond Scott

BACKGROUND

Currently living in Upstate New York, I was raised in Northern Ireland where I learned to associate the colours red, white and blue with the British Unionist community and green, white and orange with the Irish Nationalist community. We are all born without preconceived notions and the stories we share can grow bonds of commonality between us. However, from personal experience in conflict areas like Northern Ireland, sometimes stories learned at a mother or father’s knee inadvertently promote fear instead of love. I propose that the characters and colours dwelling within my art and stories will promote friendship and circumvent fear and negative connotations.

As an artist who has always been attracted and inspired by vibrant colours, I remember during my first year of school being disappointed at being given an underwhelming range of green, white and black to paint a picture. Standing at an easel the paint began running down the page so I quickly decided to catch it on my brush, covering every inch of paper. To my horror, the teacher appeared and asked what I was doing, and in a panic, I said that I was painting the mud at the bottom of my garden. I couldn't understand why the teacher was delighted but that was the first time I experienced how powerful it is when paint and nature combine as elements and how they can rescue children from their entrenched and polarised fears.

COWPOKE JACK AND CARROT HEART

My art, which is both narrative and visual, is aimed at children in the 5-9 year old age group. I have created a range of characters and dressed them in a variety of colour combinations in the hope that this will engender positive colour associations in the minds of my audience and subvert and challenge any existing notions of colour as a divisive feature.

My two main characters are a five-year-old named Cowpoke Jack, and an over-sized rabbit called Carrot Heart. Their dress code is primarily red, white and blue, and green white and orange respectively; colours I grew up with since childhood in Northern Ireland. Cowpoke Jack wears a bandana and carries their pet octopus around in a bucket.

ARTISTIC APPROACH

Style: Traditional art, tablet software, Korean ink painting.

I come from a painting background so to use paint on a brush will always be my first love. At the University of Ulster, I also practiced screen printing, photography, and illustration but in my final year my specialisation was paint integrated with found objects.

For my final year exhibition, I used the concept of effectively turning the tables on my own perception of art, where I took the most banal everyday objects that I had collected from the USA, UK, Ireland and Russia and incorporated them into my art work. I used them to create assemblages on top of canvas acting as table-tops.

This enthusiasm for tables became evident in future illustrated books such as, The Milk Whiskers, table of judges, and in my current project, Snakes, whereby the table is a reoccurring theme. Living in Japan and Korea only solidified my fixation with tables as there were so many different dishes of food presented on traditional tables.

ARTISTIC SUMMARY

I wish to reverse the negative emotions and harmful prejudices associated with colour and to promote the use of certain colour combinations as something joyful and positive. Paint and nature are intrinsic to childhood emotional stability and I believe that as much as colour can divide, colour can equally be a mechanism for healing.