Scott Prior was born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1949. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a fellowship from Massachusetts Artists Foundation. He has had residencies at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire and Ossabaw Island Program, Georgia. The artist resides in Massachusetts.

In his recent paintings Prior focuses on the landscape, an important aspect of his work through the years. Prior selects vistas that are familiar, the landscape he knows from Western Massachusetts where he lives. Staying close to home in subject matter is his way of exploring in depth the fullness and richness of a life, the ordinary that surrounds us. One of his signature subjects, the community garden of Northampton, Massachusetts, figures largely in his paintings, providing endless fascination and variation.

As Prior paints the garden, it has the magic of a secret garden and contains within it the mystery of creation. Each “gardener” has a plot of land, which can be planted according to the desire of its owner, thus creating a patchwork of nature without pattern. The garden becomes a perfect exemplification of the artist’s landscapes, which address humankind’s interaction with nature. The artist has said of this philosophy: “The beauty I try to depict is created by Nature and man, working together. The tableau best epitomized by these ideas is the garden, where the gardener toils to utilize the raw material of Nature to create art (a human construct) while Nature effortlessly and continuously reclaims itself.”

Always interested in light as part of his subject, Prior’s recent paintings manifest his love of George Inness, whose landscapes, suffused with light, reduce landscape to its essence, eschewing details in favor of atmosphere.

Prior is known for the unique sense of light, atmosphere and air that he gives to the landscapes, mostly painted before day dawns or at twilight when the land is bathed in an otherworldly light. Some of his images appear to rise from a fog, not unlike Brigadoon appearing in the mist. The artist has said of his landscape paintings: “My landscape subjects are usually specific moments in time (twilight, fog, etc.) that are more emotional and poignant because we are aware that they will be gone in a moment.”