Artists

1. Scott Hadfield
   Recent Works
2. New Works: Michael Beatty, Barbara Broughel, Scott Hadfield, Leslie Wilcox and Laura Wulf
3. Summer Group Show
4. The Annual AIDS Benefit Exhibition 2011
5. Depth and Construction
6. The Annual AIDS Benefit Exhibition 2010
7. The Annual AIDS Benefit Exhibition 2009
8. The Annual AIDS Benefit 2008
9. The Annual AIDS Benefit 2007
10. The Annual AIDS Benefit 2006
11. Scott Hadfield Biography

The Composed Moment : Notes on the Recent Work

The recent work explores the relationship between the logic of structure and the romance of moment. The paintings begin as a sequence of proposals using line to divide and organize the rectangle. As the lines accumulate, they are absorbed into the field where they alter the dominant color and thus create a history of variants. The paintings express an emphatic architecture of shape slipping backward and forward between presence and absence. The line is both armature and subject.

This body of work grew from the preparatory drawings that established the arrangement of the cut lines in the previous series of paintings. Because each of those drawings was used to explore various possible configurations of shape, they were worked and erased many times before a satisfactory solution appeared. The earliest paintings in the present series held closely to those original drawings, where the lines of color softly influenced the white of the paper and left an opalescent surface embedded with shapes and near shapes. As the work has progressed the use of color has grown increasingly rich and varied. The most recent paintings have moved even further from the monochrome to a palette that springs from the dappled complexity of the natural world.

The strategies employed in this group of paintings serve to free the process from the predicament of the arbitrary through a structure of actions that embrace the romantic impulse within the frame of the composed moment. When the qualities of passion and reason are in dynamic harmony then they express not only the power of the visual experience but they also reflect what is human and what is best.

Scott Hadfield, March 2003