This was an interesting lecture for me to attend. In my years in art school, I had forgotten that there are still working artists in the world who do not fall under the contemporary label. Mary Scurlock is one of those artists. She was also the kind of artist who assigns little to no meaning to her work. One cannot be certain if she paints for any purpose beside aesthetic.
Scurlock displayed work on wooden panels that were heavily gessoed. In places she scraped the gesso off the panel to create texture. Scurlock's only clear inspiration is the woods. I know this because the only imagery in her work is trees. Trees from below. The work was all created as if the artist was looking up the trunk of a tree. Some of the trees had leaves, some did not, however, in Scurlock's mind there was no real meaning behind this, just that she was initially afraid of painting leaves for fear of coming off as cliche. In more than one painting, Scurlock tried to create the illusion of words, not to add context or concept, but because she enjoyed the aesthetics of the scribbles. This essentially gives the effect that a bee from winnie the pooh has just flown across her painting and left it's trail behind it.
Her work was nice and shiny, very non confrontational, and of varying sizes. Scurlock employs subtle, pastel color changes that would compliment a wall in a variety of places, such as offices, public bathrooms or dentists waiting rooms.
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