Shakin’ Off the Blues | Iris Scott

The paintings in Iris Scott’s solo exhibition, Shakin’ Off the Blues, opening at Burnet Fine Art & Advisory on June 5th, showcase Scott’s well-known style of finger painting through her depiction of expressive and playful shaking dogs. A shaking dog is the symbol of play, the symbol of summer, the symbol of pleasure.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Burnet Fine Art and Filo Sofi Arts, Cranford, NJ and New York, NY. 

“Rather than relying on paintbrushes and palette knives, Scott takes a tactile approach, using paint-covered latex gloves to spread gobs of pigment across the canvas. In other words, the effect she achieves is thanks to finger painting.” – Meilan Solly, Smithsonian Magazine, 2019

Iris uses oils and up to ten colors at once. Layering daubs, throwing paint, smearing, mashing tones, and using clean blending techniques allows Iris to capture the diffraction of light through droplets of water in hyper color. Her canvases can be large and as she describes, “I’m so close to the canvas,” Iris says, “looking eye to eye with these magnificent creatures at larger-than-life scale…time flies as her fingers flail across the canvas, manipulating a rainbow of thick oil colors and weaving them into place.”

Iris Scott (born in Maple Valley, Washington, 1984) is an American contemporary visual artist known for pioneering finger painting with oils. She relocated to Coyote, New Mexico in Summer 2019 after having lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York since 2014. Raised by hippie parents on a farm, with limited exposure to technology and mass media, she entertained herself as a child by creating art and playing outdoors. Nature and imagination still remain the major influences in her artwork.

In the past decade, Iris has organically cultivated a mass following on social media with nearly 225 thousand dedicated followers on both Instagram and Facebook, with some of her viral videos having been viewed millions of times. She has sold hundreds of paintings since 2010, online and through galleries in California, Washington and Wyoming. In 2018, she had her New York City debut during an Armory week solo show at Filo Sofi Arts. The Lower East Side show drew hundreds of her fans from around the globe. It was followed a year later by a far more ambitious showing with Filo Sofi Arts, this time in Chelsea, which saw Iris expand her artistic practice to include sculpture and performance art. The show was written about by ArtNet News, Smithsonian Magazine, New York Magazine, WhiteHot Magazine, Anthony Haden-Guest, My Modern Met, Them Magazine, and the NY Post.

Gallery Hours
Burnet Fine Art & Advisory is open Tuesday–Saturday 11–5pm and by appointment