(Story courtesy CANDL Fine Art)
CANDL Fine Art opens PRESENCE, an exhibition of oil paintings by Scott Thorp, on October 2, 2026. There’s a reception that evening from 5 to 7 p.m.
An artist, writer, and educator, Thorp serves as Chair of the Department of Art and Design and Associate Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research at Augusta University.
He earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Georgia State University and an MFA in multidisciplinary art from the Mount Royal School at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In addition to his studio work, he also developed an inquiry into contemporary art through writing. As a writer and editor for “ArtPulse” magazine, he focused on artists working with emerging technologies and how new media (technology) shapes creative expression.
Drawing on his experience teaching creativity and design thinking, Thorp emphasizes collaboration and creative skill development as essential for navigating problems that are increasingly complex and difficult to define. His appearance on Dr. Keith Sawyer’s podcast, “The Science of Creativity”, reflects his ongoing effort to highlight creativity as a central competency within today’s creative economy.
His current body of work builds on a long-standing commitment to the studio and art-making. From the late 1990s through 2007, his paintings were exhibited across the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Museum of Art. However, while teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, he paused his work in the studio to focus on family, writing, and academic leadership. He has since returned to painting, with recent work exhibited in galleries and art centers across the country.
“The paintings in this exhibition are centered on the idea of presence, a term often associated with Abstract Expressionism. To me, presence is the sense of immediacy and energy a work generates. I approach each painting as an active field, building layers of imagery and texture that engage the viewer.
Rather than presenting recognizable images, I create visual conditions where meaning develops over time through the formal relationships between color, line, shape, and space. These works are informed by the networked nature of contemporary life, where order and unpredictability exist together.
Overall, the paintings use geometric references as a way of asking questions rather than providing answers, creating space for reflection within an increasingly complex visual and technological world.”
Thorp will give an artist talk on at noon Saturday, Oct. 17.
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