Scott Bakran Biography It's all about the light

I have always been interested in art.  For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the creative process.  For years, whenever one those half hour art shows would come on PBS, I would stop and watch.  I had always wanted to try painting but never acted on the desire until I was in my early thirties. 

I picked up a paintbrush for the first time in the summer of 1992.  I had just left the Navy and was waiting to start graduate school in the fall.  I spent that summer at my parent's house in Florida.  My mom had taken up painting a couple of years earlier and had a small studio set up in their house.  My curiosity got the better of me and I confessed my secret desire.  The next thing I knew she had me sitting at her easel with some oil paint squeezed out and a small canvas in front of me.  At that moment everything changed. . .

I painted that entire summer and all through graduate school, mostly copying from step-by-step "how to" books.  Once I graduated and was settled into my job, I decided to get serious about painting.  I took two years of private lessons from the dean of the local Hampton Roads painters, Charles Kello.  The two things for which I am most grateful to him are teaching me to paint my own images and teaching me how to mix color. It was under his instruction that my art began to become truly my own.

In the years since, I have painted on my own with intermittant intensive week-long workshops sponsored by The Plein Air Painters of America and through The Scottsdale Artists School; most notably, multiple workshops taught by renowned landscape painters Matt Smith and Skip Whitcomb.  For the past nine years, I have been an artist member of The American Society of Marine Artists.

My Artistic Vision

I am at a place now with my art that I don't consider myself a painter of things, I am a painter of space; specifically, the space that things occupy.  Whether it is a landscape or a still life, the atmosphere and light are my primary focus.  The objects that occupy the space in my paintings are primarily there to make the light visible and paintable.  Of course, the objects should have some intrinsic interest to catch my eye but it is the the way they are lit that makes me want to paint them.  Painting light and space is a never ending challenge and one which will occupy me for as long as I am able to paint.