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Scott Caris
September, 2015
Over the past three decades painter and graphic artist Scott Caris has continued to refine his unique style of figurative image making. With his current series of graphic artworks, the process begins with hand-drawn sketches that are digitally transformed into vector images, then enhanced by adding color – which allows richly hued, extremely sharp prints of literally any size.
Caris’s output is as prodigious as it is diverse, encompassing a wide range of subtle – and not so subtle – popular and personal culture references. He shifts seamlessly from deliciously merciless portraits of well-known Finnish political figures, to local heroes of the 1980’s Michigan punk rock scene of his youth.
While his artistic look – a style he labels “graphic pop” – is unmistakable, Caris’s early influences, including Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, are clearly visible even today.
Scott Caris might best be understood as an indie outlier – one who fiercely follows his own quirky insights and personal intuitions about life in our post-modern media terrarium. Equally, he seems a sly master of our era’s central zeitgeist – one equal parts bizarro and banal. What Caris brings to this tortured clown show, and what makes him an artist worth watching, is the effortless elegance with which he lays it all down.