NEW WORK BY ANNE SCOTT BARRETT

I have been working through the lens of memory, family, and regional folklore, as well as the diary entries of my grandmother who, as a young teen from the Mississippi Delta, reluctantly lived in Chicago during the Great Depression, the Great Migration, and The World’s Fair. The paintings speak to themes of inherited melancholia through narratives, portraits, and landscapes. The work explores the lives of people and places that have contributed to how I feel the world- people who have acted as protagonists and people who have led and taught me. I create saturated environments with chemical reactions between paper, pigment, water, and ink. The subjects are rendered with a heavy translucence that both masks and reveals, leaving the viewer a bit unsettled. The heartbreaking loss of a beloved cousin and the resulting grief forced me to deliberate the culture of a largely influential portion of my family. I have made portraits of my cousin as an amalgamation of a legacy of women in my family who lived, similarly crushed in spirit. The work acts as acknowledgment and release of the people and places involved.

Atmospheres and Transmissions Summer 2024

Long summer drives watching the landscape change and allowing the imagination to take over. The only signs of man are the lines of transmission connecting us. Using homage to traditional Chinese ink painting, I invite the viewer to focus on the aesthetics of the brush strokes and composition to bring out the essence of atmospheric changes and lines of transmission that connect and travel through our lives. The work moves through open spaces to industrial stations, revealing paths taken through flight and migration and knowing the way home by landmarks and patterns.

CAPTAIN'S LOG

May 5, 2024
Storm Shelter
When I was little and visiting my grandparents outside of Tallulah, Louisiana, we would take drives to places like Poverty Point, Monroe/West Monroe, and Lake Providence. On the nighttime drives home, I would stretch across the backseat of Poppie’s whale of a Lincoln Towncar and watch the power lines and distant lights. Mimi would always look for “our light” twinkling in the vastness. It was like picking out a star in the night sky. All those lines of transmission going to and through all the places called home and she knew which ones lead to ours.

I have a show coming up in July, and the work is meditating a lot on transmission, transportation, culverts, streams, paths, and maps.

I’m deconstructing memories and landscapes and always chasing that line my hand is compelled to make. I can’t talk without using my hands, so it makes sense that the compulsion to gesture comes out in lines.

May 13, 2024
Last Coast

Scattered thunderstorms are making their way through the paintings.

A gulf coast sunset when a cold ceiling of clouds moves in to frame it. The air is cold and the water is warm. Fishing from shore, a few last casts.

May 20, 2024
Texas Flatness
I heard a guy on the radio talking about Texas- I was in Texas at the time, hauling ass on a toll road where the landscape was mesquite and power lines forever. The guy said, “There are parts of Texas so flat; if you stand outside, you can see the curve of the earth; if you stand on a tuna fish can, you can see the back of your head.”

June 12, 2024

I worked at Creative Sources on the square in Oxford when I was twenty-something. Darby had just bought the place and hired me as a framer. It was a cool, moody gallery and frame shop on the square back when it was a mix of commerce and weirdness.

The venerable Semmes Luckett popped in one day with a little drawing inside a folder. He had just returned from testifying in Hunter S Thompson’s explosives trial, and someone had made a little sketch of him being sworn in on the stand.

I looked at the drawing, and my hands went numb- there I was, holding an original Ralph Steadman drawing. A real Ralph Steadman drawing in my hands of the man standing before me.

I quit breathing for a spell.

Semmes was tickled that I was tickled, leaving me with some profound parting words: “Life isn’t a contest, Anne Scott. It’s not about how much shit you can take in a day. “

Building frames is tedious work. My usual local frame shop is worth its weight in gold. Framing everything for my upcoming show myself has proven to me that I still have it—but shoowee, I'm not so sure I want it.

Auroras in Mississippi

A geomagnetic storm came swooping by and we saw auroras in Mississippi!

Auroras & Kudzu

Postcards From the Edge

Work from 2021 My studio space was inside a building on the Square. It inhabits the ground floor and winds down old wooden stairs into a basement outfitted with two giant floor-to-ceiling mirrors that make the space seem like a secret portal to another dimension.

Photographs I have taken over a few decades of rolling around Oxford in various stages of sobriety have been waiting for me to render them, to remember the sensations and get them out of my system.
A farewell to the spirit of Bohemia that Oxford once embodied.

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About the artist

ANNE SCOTT BARRETT (b.1969, Yazoo City, Mississippi) learned the brutality of critique and how to smoke cigarettes at Belhaven College, Jackson, Mississippi, during the late 1980s. She was part of a small cohort of student artists who occupied the art department, which was little more than a two-story garage located on a historic but dilapidated campus across the street from Eudora Welty’s home. Anne Scott instantly became immersed in Jackson’s unique music and arts scene, painting dozens of murals across the city and creating hundreds of hand-painted posters for iconic venues, festivals across the state, and sacred Blues artists. After moving from Jackson to Oxford in the mid-1990s, she continued to paint murals, designing and painting for iconic establishments. She soon began designing and painting for legendary musicians and groups.Anne Scott married and moved to California in 2000, where she continued to create hand-painted designs for musicians and began an earnest attempt at painting for herself- no brief. She traveled extensively during this time, which prompted a long and challenging period of self-examination that continues today. When the relationship ended, Anne Scott returned to Mississippi to repair and restore her timeline. She worked for a gruelling decade in service and caring for biomedical research animals and created some of the her most dynamic painted design work. Post-pandemic, Anne Scott's work focuses on narratives about her hometown and state, the people and scenery, and the lush irony and mysticism that saturate this place called home.

PROJECTS

  • Oxford Thirtieth Confernce for The Book

    Poster design for the Oxford Conference for The Book, hand-painted in watercolor and gouache on paper

    about The Oxford Conference for the Book 

  • How to Make An Egg Sandwich

    Illustration for
    Square Table: A Collection of Recipes from Oxford, Mississippi-
    Oxford Cocktail Compendium.

    cookbook available here 

  • Gorgeous Eyes Poster

    Public Health poster design
    Pandemic-era design to thoughtfully, and kindly spread awareness.

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  • Sixteenth Annual Oxford Film Festival

    Watercolor, gouache, and a little iced coffee on paper

    about Oxford Film Fest 

  • Theatre Oxford's Production of A Midsummer Night's Dream

    Watercolor and gouache painting used as a projected backdrop

    about Theatre Oxford 

The Time Machine in old photos

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Crooked Mississippi Streetwear

Mississippi Crooked Letter Original Poster

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  • Original Mississippi Crooked Letter design with inverted colors and black background 11x17
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Crooked Mississippi Streetwear

Midnight Mississippi Crooked Letter Poster

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