Scott Kilgour’s personality is cool, at a slight distance, but never cruel or ironic. The world he experiences and transmits is idealized without being dewey-eyed.
Biography
Scott Kilgour’s personality is cool, at a slight distance, but never cruel or ironic. The world he experiences and transmits is idealized without being dewey-eyed. Born and educated in Glasgow, he has known enough of sharp adversity to last him a lifetime. Twenty-three years old when he moved to New York in 1983, Scott found his balance rather quickly, voraciously swallowing museums and art galleries, surveying the scene and seeking his point of entry, his own stance. His bouquet of favorites included several surprises, Hans Hoffman and Willem De Kooning among them, artists whose excellence he recognized without needing their particular esthetics in his own work.
What Scott did discover and make use of immediately on his arrival was George Ballanchine’s great neoclassical institution the New York City Ballet, at its peak in the early and middle eighties, its repertoire as broad and sharply characterized as any performing arts company in this century. It was there, several nights a week, that he refined his sense of composition and his daughtsmanship, that absolute balance of ground and line that is Scott’s benefaction. And it is to Picasso’s transcendental neo-classical harlequins and dancers of 1922 and 1923 that Scott Kilgour’s sense of wholeness and absolute balance refers to memorably, so movingly.
Henry Geldzahler
May 1990, Southampton
1981 – Glasgow School of Arts, Scotland, B.A. Fine Arts; First Class Honors, drawing and painting
