Gus M. Scott

As a child, Gus experienced immigration to New Zealand from Kingston Upon Hull in Yorkshire, the journey from South Hampton to Wellington in 1961.

After graduating from school with a School Certificate in Art, he trained as a photolithographer and studied graphic design as a black-and-white camera operator.

After obtaining his qualification in 1975, Gus traveled to various locations, including the West Indies, particularly Grenada and Trinidad, where he developed his interest in music. He then traveled to Europe and spent a year in London, where he worked full time at an advertising agency in Whitechapel. He then moved to the inspiring south of France, where he picked grapes in Vaucluse and cycled through the Provence countryside. After traveling overland from Austria to India, Gus returned to New Zealand and began painting in Titirangi, Auckland.

In 1989, he had his first solo exhibition on Cuba Street in Wellington. Over the next decade, Gus continued his exploration of the use of archetypical and subconscious symbolism in his paintings. In 1999, he opened the “Pigeontoe Studio” in Golden Bay on the South Island of New Zealand and worked and exhibited in various media, including paint, wire, sound, music, and mosaic.

Since 2009, Gus has been living in Austria, where he has created a studio for ceramic sculptures and mosaics in the south of Vienna. Group exhibitions and playing punk jazz saxophone, together with mosaic assignments and works in mixed media, keep him fully involved in the creative process. With 2015 in mind, Gus is increasingly recognizing the need for an antidote to over-mechanized, digitized, corporate alienation from artistic handwork.

“Our souls can be nourished by art ∞ created by other souls.”
- Gus M. Scott

Influences: The Impressionists, Maori, the Pacific, Matisse, Eno, Gaudi, Art Pepper, Van Gogh, Geometry, Theo Schoon, Egypt, saxophones, Yoko Ono, chocolate, art history and the numbers seven and nine.