Encounters with Beauty: Excerpts from an Artist's Journal, 1963-2006 [first edition]

"To view from where Sam Scott stands is to see the spiritual in all things. In every touch of his brush on the canvas . . . Scott has serious intent. Each day as an artist is felt and considered; every new work containing the attention to each moment lived there. Sam Scott is and always has been a painter in pursuit of beauty."--Jennifer DoranIn Encounters with Beauty, Sam Scott's writings, excerpted from his journals, come from an artist's contemplative perspective. His thoughts offer insights and wisdom that he has gleaned over the last thirty years in Santa Fe. As a pursuer of beauty, he offers the reader a unique opportunity to look inside the artist's struggle in the pursuit of beauty and art, and its importance in our personal lives."We seem to need art now, more than ever before, to do what it always has done, which is to get our singular, internal, and imaginative responses to our world out into the world. . . . During the forty-plus years of his life as a painter, while so much of the art world has turned to the cold severities of the conceptual and the analytic, Sam Scott has remained committed to an art that is sensual and synthesizing. Now, as art seems increasingly determined to become what Peter Plagens calls 'the putatively transgressive arm of the fashion and entertainment industry,' Sam Scott makes his case for the primal place of art. He wants to remind us of the delicate balance that must be maintained in the relationship of art and life."--from William Peterson's Introduction