Celebrating arts and culture in our community
Featured in The Springfield Beacon (October 17, 2007)
Scott Wylie: Of two minds
By Austin Berger
For the Beacon
Some call it symbiosis, or yin and yang, or balance. Anyway you cut it, it’s the making of distinct elements working together. It’s a task that gets added to someone working in the field of designing architecture. It’s doubly daunting to not only pull something out of the creative mists and put it to paper or canvas, but to also make it work in the real world, and give it function. Furthermore, one must balance the function to meet the individual’s needs. It requires a very humanistic touch.From the Science Walk at the University of Oregon, to the brick work of the corner of Broadway and Willamette, to a house on High Street in Eugene, to parts of Bruce Berg’s photography studio on D Street, Scott Wylie, 61, of Springfield, pulls off the balancing act between form and function with great diligence.
Inspiration to begin:
“I always loved to draw,” says Wylie. A skill given to him by his parents; a father who found an artistic outlet through special effects lighting as a lighting engineer, and his aesthete mother who saw to it that he visited all the museums that the Boston area had to offer.
Growing up in an area which blended architecture from the modern times to the 1700’s, New England proved a great place to be inspired by architecture, prompting Scott to go to Rhode Island, and later to Rome to study. “It really had a powerful influence on my outlook on art and design from that point on…I had ideas awakening.”
With ideas still awakened after his year in Rome, he followed an old professor to the University of Oregon, a part of the country he often romanticized. Scott remembers riding in the back of a pickup truck around the Fall Creek area and how the air suddenly changed from dry firs that surrounded the outside of the Willamette wilderness. “The air went moist and sweet. Palpable as going into a curtain,” he said. After that, he became “very Oregonian.”
Up until 1998, he did all of his sketches by hand, until he was “liberated” by an Auto CAD class given to him by his wife as a gift. “It did everything I expected it to do.” Now the seemingly impossibly long designs, every individual brick and rock can be laid by a digital representation.
Mentors: Scoot Wylie's mentors in crafting his skill are also masters at the balancing act of different concepts. He cites Leonardo da Vinci, a man of science as well as a man of art, along with Pablo Picasso, who traversed between the figurative and the abstract. As for designers, he credits Frank Lloyd Wright, whose organic approach balanced the needs of the client and the natural environment surrounding the home. He also credits the Greene Brothers, whose bungalow style blended, along with architecture and landscape, the Arts and Crafts Movement with Asian design.
Art and quality of life: The contribution of the arts to quality of life has been great to Wylie. He says that he found his center in the art world, but there’s something more to it. It is within art itself that one can take multiple contradicting objects, theories, concepts, and make them work together. It is the art that is, as Wylie puts it, “the great unifier.” He feels a connection to other artists. “I like to think of them as my kin.” Oddly enough, art also turned him into a bit of a football fan. “It’s like an art … I love watching it being done really well. I love watching athletes enjoying it.”
His Legacy as an artist: Scott's legacy has been left in stone and brick for many of his works. While he wishes his legacy to be specific and clear, “something that somebody can take with them,” he wants his legacy to be something, in a word -- mathematical. Wylie knows a bit about math: graphical expressions of 4th and 5th and 6th dimensions, algorithms, the Fibonacci sequence, all sorts of things. Most importantly, he wishes that the next generation will see it in a “fractal” kind of way, that even at the very farthest and the very closest points, there’s something happening. “There's always something new to see.”
"Science Walk" by Scott Wylie
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About The Artist
Hometown: Danvers, Mass.
Favorite place to do art: Anywhere, for one can find seeds of inspiration “in the most Spartan of places.”
Favorite medium: “Anything I can draw with.”
Favorite Subjects: No job too big, no job too small.
Arts Organizations: Emerald Art Center; Springfield Arts Commission.
Awards: Six public commissions.
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