John Scott Hall

John Scott Hall

John Scott Hall, painter (b at Edmonton 17 Jan 1943). Hall studied at the Alberta College of Art, Calgary (1960-65) and Instituto Allende in Mexico (1965-66) and has taught at Ohio Wesleyan U, Delaware, Ohio (1969-70), Alberta College of Art (1970-71) and U of Calgary (1971-). He rose to national prominence during the 1970s with his large hyper-realist still-life paintings of common objects that he selected intuitively, then carefully arranged in glass-covered boxes. More recently he has painted from photographs of similar still-life arrangements of toys and souvenirs. His painstaking enlargements of these objects on canvas add to their implied importance, but the paintings are so cool and detached that they are impossible to interpret literally. Hall has exhibited widely in Canadian commercial and public galleries. In 1993-94 his solo exhibition Traza de Evidencia (Trail of Evidence) travelled to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Aquascalientes, Mexico.