THEATRE GALLERY / SEPTEMBER + OCTOBER
Field Hymns is rooted in the landscape, music, and memory of my Appalachian upbringing. These paintings are less about depicting rural life as it was and more about painting how it remains in me—abstracted, fragmented, emotional, and deeply felt.
Old-time music runs through this work like a pulse, shaping the paintings through its rhythm, repetition, and raw emotional force. Inspired by listening to and playing old-time music, I translate its feeling into paint. Banjos, fields, barns, mountains, quilts, women, and children become fragments of memory rather than literal stories. I paint intuitively, allowing color, mark-making, and abstraction to carry as much meaning as the figures themselves.
These paintings are my hymns to homeplace; to the beauty and complexity of where we come from, to the music we inherit and carry forward, and to the places that continue to live inside us long after we have left them.
Artist bio:
Kelli Scott is a contemporary figurative painter based in Huntersville, North Carolina and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Ferrum, Virginia. Her work is rooted in Appalachian landscape, memory, old-time music, and a deep sense of place. She paints intuitively, blending expressive figures, abstraction, and imagery drawn from rural life, quilts, family history, and her own experience as a banjo player, an instrument she began learning during the pandemic, which has since become an important influence in her artistic practice.
