Richard T. Scott is an American Baroque painter whose work uses the full technical inheritance of the European masters; the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, the celestial grandeur of Tiepolo, the emotional urgency of Van Gogh, in service of a philosophical project that is urgently contemporary: the reconstruction of shared beauty, meaning, and human dignity in a post-truth era.
 

His formation is as unusual as his ambition. Scott's artistic conscience was shaped first by a sustained mentorship with Joseph Norman, one of the most significant African American printmakers of his generation, whose practice confronts the full weight of American history. From there, Scott studied at the New York Academy of Art, spent two years in the studio of Jeff Koons, and completed a three-year  apprenticeship with Odd Nerdrum in Paris: one of the most rigorous and rare forms of artistic formation available to a painter of his generation. The result is an artist whose technical mastery is inseparable from a deeply considered moral and philosophical positioning in the contemporary dialogue.
 

Drawing on Humanist and Buddhist philosophy, Scott's portraits, history paintings, and interiors engage historical analogues to the present, alongside timeless mythological archetypes; using the figure to give presence and permanence to individuals, events, and ideas that continue to shape cultural consciousness. His chiaroscuro is not decorative. It is the argument made visible: light emerging from darkness as both formal language and Enlightenment metaphor, reasserting the possibility of reason, beauty, and shared reality in a culture that has largely abandoned all three.
 

Donald Kuspit has called him a New Old Master. The designation was meant as praise. Scott has always understood it as a challenge.

His work is held in permanent collections on three continents, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern in Barcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sicily, and the Adoro Museum, as well as the private collections of President Bill Clinton and Philip Anschutz. He has exhibited at Le Grand Palais in Paris, Palazzo Cini in Venice, and the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern in Barcelona. He has designed coins and congressional medals for the United States Mint, including the 2016 Fort Moultrie quarter, and was selected for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Copyist Program in 2006.
 

Scott teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has lectured at the Tyler School of Art, the Florence Academy of Art, and the University of Georgia, among others. His work has been featured on NPR, PRI, Fine Art Connoisseur, and American Art Collector.

Scott is the creator and host of Outside the Lines with Richard T Scott, a documentary series exploring the lives and philosophies of visionary artists.  

 

Richard's CV

“Richard T. Scott [is] what I have called the New Old Masters; that is, they use Old Master styles to mediate modern reality and to give emotional and cognitive depth to events that the mass media would treat superficially (one more momentarily hot news story, here today, gone tomorrow)".

 - Donald Kuspit, Art Critic.
 

“Whether it is in his portraits, his compositions, or either still in his interiors, Richard T. Scott always tries to produce, on his spectators, a certain effect of strangeness, or at least, something like a feeling of longing. That's why, maybe, his compositions are populated for the greater part with mirrors in which appear, not simply beings just like those who face us - but of real spectres having the function to destabilize our glance while giving the fourth dimension for us to see” - by Frédéric Charles Baitinger, Critic, Artension