SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth, Feb. 8 1961, Shreveport, Louisiana Family wife Diane, son Jack, daughter Annie To relieve stress, I kayak every single day. It’s my exercise and I’m getting it in a beautiful way.
Without it I’m a mess.
My best friend is my son Jack, who’s a nature videographer. I couldn’t be more proud.
One of my most important influences is music. If I could do anything, it would be music. It’s what everything else is trying to do.
I like to read poetry, biographies, ÿction and nature books.
Favorite album: Jackson Brown, Saturate Before Using.
The movies I’ve watched the most: Jeremiah Johnson and Secret of Roan Innish, a folk tale in IrelandFantasy dinner guests: author Jim Harrison, Bruce Lee, He Dog, a Cheyenne Indian, Myrna Loy, my son Jack and Ernie Kilman When I was a kid, my heroes were my family, my dad and mom, aunts and uncles. I was fortunate to have really strong in◊uences from those people.
They taught me everything I am: my love of music, to be kind and generous.
My best tip for finding art in everything: The power of observation; if you can slow your eyes down and notice things, if you’re observant, you’ll catch things that are◊eeting and beautiful. They add up;
you could ÿnd art in things all day long. If you arouse your observation and curiousity, you’ll ÿnd more art, beauty and depth instead of the surface.
If I had an extra hour in the day, I’d paddle (kayak).
Harried professionals walk past a sculpture in the courtyard of Acxiom Corp. headquarters in Little Rock. Students make their way around three wavy stone columns - 11 feet tall and 8,700 pounds each - into the applied computational engineering and services building at the University of Texas at Austin. And as Fayetteville architect Marlon Blackwell heads out the door to work, he passes a 3-D wall hanging.
The abstract works of sculptor Scott Carroll have found homes all over the country.
His art is intended to capture ordinary, fleeting moments, beautiful exchanges, the majesty of nature: slices of life that are big and real. He says that creating them is like being born; bringing something tangible into the world.
This tactile form of life etched in stone, steel, bronze and wood has attracted the attention of gallery owners in New York, San Francisco, Houston and San Antonio, and closer to home, such as Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville and, in Dallas, Craighead Green Gallery and the Kristy Stubbs Gallery.
As a young sculptor, Carroll had free use of studio space, thanks to his high school ceramics teacher, and Norman Petersen and Garry Knox Bennett, noted art furniture makers in San Francisco, with whom he apprenticed. This meant practicing his art in poorly lighted areas, including a place with 20-foot ceilings and fluorescent lights.
“If you can make it look good in that light, and if you like it, then it is going to look good when you get it in real light,” Carroll says.
These days, the artist is commissioned mainly for large sculptures like the one on the University of Texascampus. His last work was more than 7 feet tall and his current project, False River, is an 8-foot-tall sculpture commissioned by a Tulsageologist.
“The stuff he has done that’s most peculiar are the large-scale pieces,” says Robert Ginsburg, host of Shades of Jazz on KUAF-FM, 91.3, and Carroll’s friend.
“We had this mutual love of the outdoors and would attend get-togethers of people from that area [where he had property on the Kings River] …. At one point, he had kept finding these amazing pieces of log and log roots” that he incorporated into his work.
It’s one way that nature not only inspires him but creeps into his art. Many times Carroll’s renditions are dubbed abstract, and though he never set out to become an abstract artist, his works sometimes pay homage to other things without representing them.
“We have a piece [of his] that hangs in our house that I love and would never get rid of,” says Marlon Blackwell, department head at Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “It’s an abstract plan of our house. He thought it would fit perfectly [here], and it does.”
Blackwell recommends Carroll’s art to clients on occasion and has also commissioned him.
“His work is not so abstract that it’s disconnected; there’s some connection about the material or about nature, there’s a nice balance. It’s not literal. It keeps the work open for your own interpretation and set of subjective feelings about it,” he says.
Unlike many artists, Carroll never begins his projects by sketching. Instead, he thinks through the process. His memory, he says, has a high capacity. Something might roll around as an idea for nearly 10 years before it takes actual form. He often makes small “affordability” models before creating a fullscale piece so that, if he wants to detour and work on something else, it serves as a place holder, even if it eventually becomes something entirely different.
One such model was a series of aluminum strips combined to represent smoke rings and the beginning of a campfire. The end result appeared in the Craighead Green Gallery in 2009 after an inception-to-sculpture process of seven years.
“These aluminum panels that he used encaustic … I thought those were stunning sculptural pieces, interconnected and balanced on each other. I thought they worked very well,” says Brad Ellis, a painter who resides in Dallas and has known Carroll for 25 years. He is one of the very few Carroll will talk art with. Theirs is a mixture of friendship and creative exchange.
When working on wall hangings or models, Carroll uses his top-floor home studio, which has windows on all sides that fill the space with natural light. He saves the messy metalworking and woodworking for a friend’s studio in Dallas.
An early riser as well as a night owl, he has never needed much sleep. When creating a sculpture, Carroll says, he sometimes works for up tothree days without sleep.
He brings that intensity to every part of his life.
“He has a personality that is really powerful and it comes across in an engaging way,” Ginsburg says. “When he meets someone he’s interested in, he wants to know everything about you, and that’s part of what’s required to be an artist - to stay focused - and Scott has that.”
The deeply focused manner of his art means that getting refreshed is a little different from the average person’s workday. In fact, his workspaces always include an outdoor shower so that every eight hours or so he can recover from the demanding physical labor and put on a clean pair of overalls.
“If it’s going right, you’re in the zone,” Carroll says. “Sometimes I don’t want to stop after three days; sometimes you just give out, quit.”ANOTHER LIFETIME
Carroll’s family moved around a lot. Born in Louisiana, he would live in Arkansas, California and Texas before he went to college. Playing ball helped him make friends more quickly. At one point, he was the point guard of the basketball team and quarterback of the football team at an all-boys Jesuit high school, where his new friends were watching out for him. They convinced him to sign up for a ceramics class thathad a reputation for being an “easy A,” and thus help him maintain the football eligibility requirement of a 3.0 gradepoint average.
The teacher, simply known as Brother Rivette, helped students feel comfortable and confident enough to use art uniquely. Rather than being very strict and structured, he would give a few pointers and let students do their thing.
“He let me reveal myself,” Carroll says. “I was always an artist. I didn’t even know what an artist was. I’d never been around [them] but I always knew, since I was a little boy, that the way my eyes worked and what I saw and the way I perceived - it was not the way other people did.”
Rivette fostered the students’ natural strengths. Under his tutelage, Carroll produced a lot of work, including many busts, using an old-fashioned Japanese-style kiln.
Carroll stayed in the program four years, rather than the average two or three, and spent any time he wasn’t in class or ball practice in the studio.
THE SCIENCE
OF BECOMING AN ARTIST
Carroll’s family worked in the oil industry and encouraged him to study geology, engineering or any subject related to oil that would lead to a lucrative job. He had always been interested in nature andspent a lot of time camping, so in 1978 he entered the University of Arkansas as a geology major. He had been financially independent through high school, but a year into college, he ran out of money and left to work in offshore oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. The work was hard and he was gone more than 60 days at a time, so he wrote extensive letters to friends.
Two and a half years later, he returned to UA with a Porsche, a truck and enough money to pay tuition. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in geology in 1984, when people who had been in the oil business for decades were being fired, and his chances of finding a job were little to none. This time, his family encouraged him to study petroleum law in Texas, a suggestion Carroll politely ignored. But he still didn’t know what to do.
Fortunately for him, all those letters shipped from Alaska made more rounds than he knew.
A friend who was working for the Andy Warhol-founded Interview magazine married a man who had a connection at Southern magazine, which sought to hire writers with unique perspectives. During their years of dating, the friend had shared Carroll’s letters with her beau, and he remembered Carroll’s way with words.
Before long, Carroll was working with noted writersDonavan Webster, Jim Morgan and Linton Weeks. He says he enjoyed the creativity and the chance to work with other talented young people, but he didn’t identify as a writer.
FUNNY LITTLE THING CALLED FATE
While he was in San Francisco for a wedding, something clicked, and he decided he wouldn’t return to Arkansas.
Being in a new place and having a fresh start gave Carroll the mindset he needed to give art a real shot.
“I knocked on a thousand doors in San Francisco [before] this one guy, Norman Petersen, took me in,” Carroll says.
Like Rivette, furniture designer Petersen had an Old World way of doing things. His grandfather had been a shipbuilder in San Francisco, and Petersen required the same extreme craftsmanship from his proteges that he’d learned from his family.
Carroll built art furniture based on Petersen’s designs for two years, which required him to work with all types of materials. The experience proved more valuable than art school.
“His pieces served a functional purpose,” Ellis says. “They were artistic and sculptural at the same time. I can see the transition [from furniture maker to sculptor]. The materials and shapes he used, tables and lamps and thingslike that, there’s a real natural transformation.”
Working on Petersen and Bennett’s designs gave Carroll a skilled technique, daily dedication to the craft and an avenue to form his own ideas of how he would make furniture and other designs.
“You’re always learning, but in the beginning it [helped me with] figuring out how to do something with some of these ideas, so it definitely unlocked a lot of thought problems: how to do it, the confidence to do it and approach it.”
After moving to Dallas in 1991, Carroll still worked as a furniture maker and created sculptures on the side. He developed a couple of lines of furniture and prototypes for Pottery Barn. It was a career that meant he often hobnobbed with architects and interior designers, who would visit his space to view or buy furniture and get sidetrackedby his sculptures.
Lately, the artist whose creations have made it into the collections of Ford Motor Co., Coca-Cola Co. and Neiman Marcus continues to strengthen his bond with his most consistent muse: nature.
Somewhere in the Ozarks, he’s fishing. He’s hiking, rock climbing, caving or taking the kayak for his daily spin. And as he lays his head on a sleeping bag under the stars and drifts off, the colors, textures and impressions begin to take shape.
Northwest Profile, Pages 27 on 01/12/2014