Iris Scott

Iris Scott (b.1984) grew up in Maple Valley, Washington on what she describes as a “one-family hippie commune”. She and her sister spent evenings listening to their mother, a writer, tell epic tales about the anthropomorphized lives of the family’s pet parrots, lizards, cats, goats, and rabbits—with wild coyotes appearing in the stories as special guest stars. Iris’ father, a custom cabinet maker, worked in a shop attached to the house, and Iris absorbed how a woodworker manifests their ideas with their hands.

Scott’s college years were spent in Florence, in the same centuries-old halls where Raphael, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci worked. In her mid-twenties Iris moved to a tiny apartment overlooking a rainforest outside of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. There she stumbled upon finger painting when a serendipitous lack of clean brushes prompted her to finish a painting with her fingertips. In that moment she recognized how fingers could scoop oil paint better than brushes, and overnight she committed to leaving her brushes behind. Scott worked exclusively as an oil finger painter from 2010 to 2020.

Her journey as a finger-painter began in the greater Seattle area where she showed at Cole Gallery from 2013 – 2015. As her art grew in notoriety, she moved to New York, where she lived and worked in a Brooklyn loft space for six years.

The bustling energy of New York led Iris, in 2019, to seek isolation and solitude in Northern New Mexico. In 2020 the artist and her husband, a writer, purchased 500 acres overlooking Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe had once famously painted. Together the creative pair built a house and studio adjacent to national wilderness. Their adobe home sits perched on the edge of a canyon, within walking distance from caves, dinosaur bones, native ruins, and petroglyphs.

Much like the accidental discovery of finger painting over a decade ago, Iris happened upon another brush-free painting technique soon after she moved to New Mexico. While cleaning dust off a wet artwork with her shop air compressor, Iris inadvertently blasted surprising and beautiful circular marks into the surface of the fresh paint. Iris recognized the potential of the air compressor’s marks immediately. Ever since that day Iris has emphatically pursued a new body of work she calls “air paintings”.