Scott Short
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Actually, Short is painting from copies of copies. He xeroxes a sheet (whose original color gives each work its parenthetical title), then xeroxes the xerox, then xeroxes that xerox, up to as many as 400 times, to produce what he calls “blooms” of tiny black marks. He selects a copy he likes, then projects a slide of it onto a canvas and traces the marks with black paint, a painstaking process that can take hundreds of hours. The variations this creates are unexpected: Untitled (Yellow) (2005), painted after only a few generations of copying, features a surprising number of tiny, irregularly shaped black specks in horizontal bands; the black in Untitled (White) (2005) seems to be congealing into horizontal and vertical bands made up of repeating cell-like white shapes.
Short got his BFA and MFA at Ohio State, where he availed himself of the library’s collection of Life magazines. Since they didn’t circulate, he’d photocopy the images he wanted. Then, he says, “I started recopying them to make the grain denser, changing into more of a two-tone image than a halftone. I found it really interesting the way that different machines, or the same machine on other days, would cluster and clump together the blacks in various ways, almost like different wood grains.”
