BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS BY RICHARD SCOTT

With the Beauty and the Beast series, Richard stumbled across a theme that, like most of his work, was inspired by an interaction with his son Richie.

Beauty and the Beasts started in 2005 when my son, Richie, who was three at the time, was playing Microsoft 3D Pinball on my computer. He said the pinball machine looked like a funny man. I did a screenshot and printed it. It took me a while to figure out, but there it was, amongst the flippers, LED’s, flashing lights and bumpers. Sometime later I went about doing screenshots and flattening the image, 2 colours, export to jpeg, etc. The outcome was a very simplified funny man I called Pinball Wizzard.

As before, all the elements of simplicity are present. His style is distinctively recogniseable as that of Richard Scott’s. The new characters have identities and will find their place in his iconography. The introduction of this body of work offers the collectors of his work something new yet distinctively familiar. The work venture into new territory that will appeal to a different market, “A more academic market”, says Scott

The Five Musketeers of Richard Scott’s restless, feverish imagination are a roguishly irresistible crew, as startled to see us as we are to see them, and not even the semi-naked sirens posing in their shadow can distract us from their cartoonish-coloured charms.

Yes, beauty has the best of it in this world, but step away from that world and into this one, and you will see that the Beast, in the end, will always happily ever after have Beauty.

When: 18 June at 6pm

Where: Worldart Cape Town, 54 Church Street.

Exhibition runs till 26 June