Scotty Peek lives in Columbia, SC and teaches Art at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School. Prior to joining the Heathwood faculty, Scotty was an Assistant Professor of Art at South Carolina State University, held positions from Preparator to Assistant Director at several South Carolina Museums and Galleries, and taught art courses part-time at the University of South Carolina and Midlands Technical College. He received his Master’s in Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina in 2000 and his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Austin Peay State University (TN) in 1995. Scotty was included in the 2004 Triennial at the South Carolina State Museum, was one of four artists selected for 701 Center for Contemporary Art’s inaugural 2008 exhibit, and was one of nine artists recently included in “En Plein Air: Scenes of SC” at the Columbia Museum of Art. Artist Statement: I mostly paint and draw landscapes, often abstracted to various degrees. I enjoy the visual evidence of investigation through mark-making, and never seek to hide the process. I usually begin each painting from life or photo reference, but then abandon the reference to paint freely, often destroying some of the realistic illusion that may be developing. This begins a back-and- forth, working from the reference again, building, destroying, deciding what's important, what's not, etc., until I think the painting, while grounded in reality, offers something beyond a direct representation. I want each painting to have a unique identity and character of its own, possibly suggesting something unexpected about our surroundings. There are many genuine psychological and intellectual reasons I could give for being drawn to the landscape as an artist. Ultimately, the only one that matters is that I can't seem to exhaust the landscape as an interesting subject. From any given point, there are thousands of possible landscape paintings, each offering its own set of observations, and each suggesting something different.