F. SCOTT HESS
Photo by Abel Alejandre
An accomplished figurative and conceptual artist, F. Scott Hess has been described as a “New Old Master” because he specializes in figurative paintings, in the style of the Old Masters, creating scenes from everyday life; however, with the distinct addition of fantasy and allegorical elements, injected pieces with his own brand of eroticism, symbolism and satire.
Hess’s well-developed painting techniques involve detailed drawings and outlines before oil paint and tempera ever are applied. In fact, he is famous for his precise brushwork and attention to detail. Where other artists might “knock” out or “imply” a lock of hair, Hess paints in every strand. Under the adage, “paint what is there. Paint what you see. And if there is a wall, each and every brick is treated as unique, no cutting corners.”
His most recent endeavor is a spectacular mural project to be installed at Bnai Jehudah in Kansas (consisting of a total of 64 inches x 104 feet of canvas on twelve panels).
In the midst of that? Hess is writing his memoir. A memoir which covers his early childhood in Florida, art school at the University of Madison in Wisconsin, and studies abroad in Vienna, transporting readers to the origins of his development as a visual artist.
Hess is represented by Koplin del Rio and notable gallery exhibitions include “The Hours of the Day” (twenty-four paintings, modeled after a medieval Book of Hours, with injections of art history, the Bible, and daily family interactions), displayed at the Orange County Museum of Art and “The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation” (an assemblage of artifacts, depicting a fantasy paternal history) featured at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.
The art critic Donald Kuspit has suggested, "Hess uses profane realism to represent the sacred moments of life, for he knows we live in a profane world with little or no sense of the sacred, let alone of the sacredness of art.”
In this interview, Hess discusses the writing of his new memoir and his art practice.
Introduction and interview by Millicent Borges Accardi
What inspired you to write a memoir? Was it your mother’s death? Or a combination of things?
I started writing a few chapters over twenty years ago because I thought some of my memories should be preserved, but it was haphazard and very spotty. My biological father died in 2014, my mother and stepfather in 2017. When your parents die you have an overwhelming awareness that you are now on deck and that time is limited.
I had a desire to get to it (the memoir), but it was the Covid pandemic isolation that really propelled it forward because distractions were cut to a minimum.
How are your memoir and art practice intertwined?
In general I feel that my painting and writing exercise two different creative muscles. Throughout my life painting has been dominant, but I’ll go off on a writing binge now and again, and it dominates my consciousness for a while. I am a master at painting, but far less than that at writing, and the more I do it the more I’m aware of my shortcomings with words. There are some cross-overs though. As a narrative painter I’ve been very focused on what activates the viewer to engage with a narrative, what to do to make a narrative visually readable, and some of that is useful in writing a story, describing characters and their expressions, giving them a setting, building metaphors and motifs, etc.
You deal with revealing topics, cadavers, your sex life, issues with your father. How difficult was it to relive these times and reveal them to friends and family in a semi-public forum?
Much to the chagrin of my family I’ve probably been too open throughout most of my art career. I’ve just put stuff out there that other people would keep covered. If a dark secret is put in sunlight it gets bleached clean, and I don’t think most of my oddities are that earth shaking, but some of what I have written might have personal or public repercussions.
I’m just accustomed to being blunt and expressing what needs to be expressed in my art work, so in writing I naturally do the same.
“Stutterer,” 1978, pencil on paper, size unknown (early erotic work)
“The Perversion of Eugenie de Mistival,” 1977, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 23 x 29 inches (early erotic work)
“Tongue Tied,” 1978, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 23 x 29 inches (early erotic work)
Who is your ideal reader?
The ideal reader or desired audience is a very hard question for me. I know writers are told to know who their intended audience is, and I may still be working that out. An editor would be helpful in that at some point. I think first I’m writing it for me, to look back on my lived life as I have never done before. I’m not nostalgic, so some of these temporal explorations I’m bringing up for the first time.
That said, I’ve done a lot of genealogical work on various family lines, and I have an appreciation for “the historical record.” So writing my life story for my children, or generations beyond, is in the mix.
Finally, because I’ve had some success as an artist, I would hope the book would carry some interest for people who enjoy art and have an interest in artists’ lives. We are an odd breed by nature, and this memoir of the first thirty years of my life follows my journey through all the phases of becoming an artist, my childhood trials and tribulations, awkward adolescence, stumbling through learning the craft, and eventual success.
You had a unique childhood where you expressed an interest in creating art at an early age, like your “Voodoo Mud Dolls” (that could be an art installation). How important do you feel childhood is to the shaping/forming of an artist?
My first chapter is about my father’s abandonment of the family when I was six, and his telling me that now I was “the man of the house.” Within weeks I was making drawings of women tied-up, having no idea that one shouldn’t draw such things, and not realizing until twenty years later that I was binding the mother so she would not leave as well. Drawing this was an act of magic, an expression of things critical to my existence.
I’m sure nobody else wanted me to be making those drawings, but I felt compelled to do it due to the trauma of my parents’ divorce. Many children have secret lives and develop within that an imaginative capacity that can be astounding. I think society tries to flog it out of most of us, aim us toward useful careers, earning money, and fitting in. I just happened to have developed through a series of life events and an upbringing that allowed me to withstand that.
There are distinct sections in the memoir: childhood, education, Vienna, post-Vienna Los Angeles. Which one is the most “key” or significant?
My six years in Vienna were a critical component in my artistic and personal development. I stepped out into the world, leaving my support systems behind, and found new ones. But everything before that built toward that blossoming, and what came after was the harvest of those fruits.
“The Wild Painters,” 1981, egg tempera and oil mixed technique on canvas, 37 1.2 x 45 inches (Vienna work)
“Farewell Feast,” 1984, oil on canvas, 56 x 84 1 1/2 inches (Vienna work)
“Razor's Edge,” 1982, oil on canvas, 39 x 25 inches (Vienna work)
Was writing this [memoir] cathartic?
Writing this memoir was not cathartic. I think my exhibition “The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation” took care of catharsis. In that I replaced the abandoning father with a thousand forefathers. There is a fine catalogue for that show, and the Shirin Bazleh movie F. Scott Hess: A Reluctant Realist (available on Amazon Prime!) tells the story of making that quite well. This memoir is an exploration of my life, an examination of how I came to be who I am, and tries to understand those currents better.
The psychological reasons for some of my actions (in both art making and relationships) have become clearer through writing. I had a genuine surprise at some of the recurring motifs (teeth popped up a lot), and enjoyed turning over and thinking about the friendships I’ve had. Memoir writing is also a creative act, because the narrative has to be crafted. Certain memories take precedent over others, and some need to be recreated because my memory has holes. I want to make it an interesting read, a compelling narrative, and that is a very hard task.
I was astonished reading through this memoir, how you were able to recall names, places, dates, events. With nearly a photographic memory. Did you keep a journal? How were you able to remember so much, even in pretty chaotic times?
Going into this I thought my memory was quite weak and that I’d better write down what I do remember before it is all gone. But as you dig deeper, more comes back. I also have saved some letters that helped a lot. I have many of my mother’s letters from Florida and Wisconsin, sent to her parents. With those I could set up a time frame and do some extrapolating. I have a hundred letters from my former college girlfriend, and she sent me copies of some of mine, all of which was invaluable in reanimating the past.
My visual memory is pretty good, but I don’t remember dialogue very well, and the book has a lot of dialogue. That had to be recreated, starting with a remembered line or conversation, but the gist of it is true at least to my memory of events. Others in my story might see it all differently.
What, in your opinion, is the biggest secret you reveal in the memoir?
Do I have secrets? I’m just telling a series of events, some of which will seem odd to some readers.
That a divorce led a seven year old boy to draw hardcore bondage is one thing another person might have hidden, but I never did. I wrote a 97 page porn novel at sixteen and took it to school.
That might be odd and certainly gained me some notoriety in my small town high school. The Austrian grave-robbing will disturb some, but it’s not that wild, just bones of the long dead. I tried to be honest yet clever in the writing about my sex life so that it wouldn’t read as too lurid, but because I was making erotic art I couldn’t leave it out of the story either. I’ve always been a bit of a strange fellow but I’ve never been very secretive about it. This book is a compendium of things I recall, and memory tends toward preserving the events that were unusual.
The humor as it appears in the memoir was welcome and unexpected, like — I laughed out loud about the classroom scenes in Wisconsin and the science project and introduction. Also, the passage about coming from a long line of “alcoholics or ministers,” and the table tennis trophy story. What was your intention by including humor?
All three of the excerpts you mention involve irreverence in some way.
My sense of humor is often dark, or twisted, or dry, and plays on the edge of what is acceptable. I probably find a lot more scenes in my memoir “funny” than most readers would. Me getting hungry in an anatomy class when the professor is showing us “steaks” of human thighs, or when his assistant Igor wheels in a gurney of skinned baby cadavers, are grotesque events, but there is also very dark humor there that plays on several levels.
I make a lot of wisecracks and jokes with friends, students, faculty, and more than a few times have “stepped over the line.” But that “line” is where the action is in humor. If I am trying to take the reader through the emotional range of my experiences, then humor has to be a component of that.
Overall there is a sense of abandonment, detachment, like the weight of this question of a boy of eleven, “If a father can leave, why not a god?” Have you considered the role of abandonment in your life and work? How it has driven you to make particular choices?
There was the abandonment at six by “the father,” and the subsequent fear of abandonment by the mother, both of which drove my art and affected relationships. Early in life I felt that I could only count on my art to stay with me, that all human relationships were potentially transitory. That didn’t mean that I didn’t invest in relationships. I did, but the “rock” I could always count on was art.
The missing father did have a huge impact on my religious views, and because of that I had a sense of being an outsider in my town and in my beliefs. That led to questioning many other establishment rules, and a gradual broadening of my mind, but it took an education to make greater sense of those rough ideas.
“Brother, Welcome to Silverlake,” 1984, oil on canvas, 68 1 1/4 x 84 inches (early Los Angeles work)
“X-mas BBQ,” 1985, oil on canvas, 67 x 95 inches (early Los Angeles work)
“Piece of Cake,” 1986, oil on canvas, 68 x 96 inches, Laguna Art Museum (early Los Angeles work)
Advice you were given as a youth, “Oh, no…Nobody makes a living at art. You should major in something else. Something that can earn some money. Do art on the side.” You must feel vindicated to have triumphed.
Several of my lectures to my MFA classes had to do with Myths of the Artist. Society sets up several “models” of how an artist should be, and we artists oblige by fitting those expectations. I realized in doing some research that for years the story of my career I’d been telling in lectures and interviews followed the course of The Hero’s Journey. It was a perfect narrative fit and completely unintentional. This memoir also follows that outline, and the teachers and guidance counselors who told me “don’t go into art” are the guardians between the Known and the Unknown, sitting at the threshold and telling me not be so foolish as to proceed. Of course, I’d not be writing this memoir if I hadn’t pushed through that advice.
The section about the broken plaster head being a metaphor “for my whole life as a representational artist.” Can you expand on this?
I recently read a bit on metamodernism, and I won’t claim to understand much about it, but reconstructing what postmodernism has deconstructed had resonance for me.
In my youth, abstract art ruled the academies, so making representational figurative art was rebellious, but also connected me to centuries of great art-making. When the abstract painter professor smashed the plaster head that depicted all the muscles of the face because he didn’t like me drawing it, I took it home and glued it back together. The knowledge presented in that anatomy cast was necessary for all the expressive human figures I would spend my life painting, but it was also a plaster copy of an 18th century study sculpture. I literally reconstructed elements of the past to propel my art into the future.
You comment a few times about how you were “committed to the figure” from early days as a budding artist/student. What about the figure inspires? Interests? Compels? The figure versus landscape (for example).
I always worked with the figure, from the earliest age doing the erotic art, then later in paintings of social interactions. Humans respond powerfully to images of other humans. The functioning of our mirror neurons means we feel the actions of others in our gut, before our brains have a chance to be analytical, and before language kicks in.
All of the emotions and thoughts I needed to express were carried through the depiction of people, most of them engaged in forms of psychological conflict. This is where I worked out, or at least made visible, the issues that were gnawing at my subconscious. Often my works just poured out of me, and then six months later I’d have that “ahhah” moment, “So that is what that meant.”
There are many references to cliffs, ditches, roofs, cornfields as in, “standing at the cliff’s edge” — pushing the edge. Close but not too far. Does this apply to artwork also? That tension.
I always wanted that tension in my work. I didn’t want the painting to be pretty or decorative. I didn’t want it to please. I really wanted to make my viewer feel a little uncomfortable.
I think my ideal response would be a person studying the art on a gallery wall, being intrigued, but then going home and they just can’t get it out of their head. You might not understand why you are hooked, but your thoughts have been impacted and you have felt the painting deeply.
Was writing the memoir a way of “purging demons,” getting everything down on paper? And revealed? Out in the open?
Getting everything down on paper is a big motivating factor in my memoir writing, but I don’t think “purging demons” is.
I feel most of my demons have been purged through my years of drawing and painting. However, preserving memories and my thoughts and feelings about them is a big reason to do a memoir. When you die, all of the narrative that is your life vanishes with you, unless you have some way of leaving some of that behind. Until scientists devise a way to download the contents of my brain, I am forced to use less perfect means to leave a trace of my life behind.
You received an art degree and were accepted into a Vienna art school with pencil drawings. As you said, “most students would start several panels to work on as the others dried. I observed carefully and often, but I wasn’t jumping in yet. I was still committed to the pencil.” Was the pencil like training wheels on a bicycle? Or, did you see drawing as tantamount to perfecting your drawing skills? Why do you think you waited what some would call an inordinate time to move from pencil drawings to oil painting?
I was stubborn, so not turning to painting earlier probably had something to do with that. I’ve had some students over the years who were as stubborn as I was, and it is not always a great trait. They would learn a lot faster if they were a little more open-minded.
Also, my University of Wisconsin teachers were not painters. To work with the figure I had to take drawing and printmaking courses, where there were professors who worked with the figure. The painting professors were almost all abstract artists. All that aside, drawing is the foundation of my painting. I understand form because I spent so many years looking and drawing what I saw.
“The Dream Of Art History,” 2018, 54 x 96 (based on a dream the artist had in 1978 and written about in the memoir)
F. Scott Hess is currently editing his memoir. View more of his artwork on his site and Instagram
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Millicent Borges Accardi is the author of two full-length poetry collections, most recently, Only More So (Salmon Poetry 2016). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, Barbara Deming, Fundação Luso-Americana (FLAD). Her close to 50 reviews and interviews have appeared in publications such as Another Chicago Magazine, Portuguese American Journal, and AWP Writers’ Chronicle. Find her @TopangaHippie (Twitter and IG).
