Scott A. Wilber is a San Francisco artist working as a painter and sculptor.

 

Most recently Scott has been building paintings and sculptures that mimic the “life-stories” that used objects can tell. 

 

The distressed and layered look that an old home has, that the worn bookshelves and cabinetry has after decades of repainting and repair, can spark stories. That layering reminds one of the “life” objects have. 

 

Using the sections to build a composition, Scott layers multimedia so that depth is built, so that it feels like looking into the past. 

 

The new paintings use icons, symbols and characters that are derived from popular culture influences from his childhood, things that have long influenced his work. He draws from comic books and television — including Saturday morning cartoons and old late-night B&W shows — to create a graphic, cartoon quality, and uses the structure of the found cabinetry appearance to “contain” a story within the framework of the boxes. 

 

While the building sculptures are like miniature contained stories, modestly-sized like books that live on those aged shelves.  

 

Each contained story is similar to the chapters of a comic, cells of an animated cartoon, or a 30 minute TV show with a wrap up ending — the full story lives within the snapshot of the section.

Scott has said this of his inspiration for the new works. “At the time (the 70’s and 80’s) I thought my childhood was horrible and characterless. It was devoid of anything worth sharing or influential. Eventually I learned to draw from it and I learned that it was a pretty ripe playground even if I was in a place in the country that didn’t embrace diversity, much less creativity. I came to realize that the experience that I had was rich because I got to watch and see all the same great things that the kid in Los Angeles had, or New York, and that I was having a similar experience. That I had a connection to something.”

 

Scott has over 30 years experience teaching, having influenced the creative joy of middle school and Kindergarten levels since 1994.