Sir Peter Scott (1909 – 1989) (Copy)

Once, in the 1960s, I was, in my early twenties, working in what was called the “bird room” of the Royal Ontario Museum, drawing from specimens, when, just around the corner, there was a sudden hubbub.  Peter Scott was visiting.  I was too shy to walk the few feet around the corner to meet him, and hoped he would come around to where I was…but it didn’t happen…that’s as close to him as I ever got.  But that said, his art was even then well known to me, and he was, more than perhaps any artist on this list, as close to an artist “acceptable” to the fine art community as any, as well as both very famous and successful as an artist (among his many accomplishments) and at marketing his work, but doing so by following his own muse.  Essentially, he was a gifted all-around painter who specialized in landscapes (marsh, sea, shore, fen, flooded meadow, skyscapes) in which there were birds…usually waterfowl native to the UK, but not exclusively.  Unless specifically doing illustrations, the work of his that I most often saw of his reproduced was done not as illustration, but as gallery art.  While I never was very good at scenery, he assuredly influenced me, and of course others, such as Keith Shackleton, a close friend of Scott’s who travelled with him to Antarctica, but whose works I was late to discover.  I don’t want to paint “like” them, preferring to show my birds “up close and personal”, but they certainly inspired and informed me, and still do.  I walk, and paint, in the shadows of giants, I quite realize, and I do so with the greatest pleasure.