Scott's career belongs to the small group of late-twentieth-century American painters who carried the gestural and color-based vocabulary of first-generation Abstract Expressionism into the second half of the century, and whose work, in his case, has been deepened and transformed by half a century of close engagement with the landscape, light, and spiritual cultures of the American Southwest.
Scott came to art through one of the most distinguished teaching environments in postwar American painting. His training in Baltimore placed him in direct contact with five of the most consequential American painters of the mid-twentieth century, working in close pedagogical contact with him during his formative years. The graduate scholarship that followed his graduation gave him the means to travel and to deepen his exposure to European and American art at first hand.
The decisive move of his early career was his 1969 relocation to Santa Fe. The high-desert landscape, the Pueblo and Hispano cultures of northern New Mexico, the Native American spiritual traditions to which he had already been drawn, and the working artist community of the city consolidated the direction of his subsequent painting. The lyrical, color-saturated, gestural abstraction that emerged across the 1970s drew on the New York School foundations of his training but registered the particular weather, geology, and atmosphere of his new home in ways that set his work apart from the more strictly nonobjective practice of his teachers.
His early one-person exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art, the first such show given by the institution to a living artist, placed him at the centre of the contemporary New Mexican art world at a young age, and the Whitney Biennial inclusion the following year extended his platform to the national stage. The body of work he produced through the 1970s and 1980s combined large-scale color-field abstraction with the kind of allusive, near-figurative landscape reference that became his particular contribution to American postwar painting.
The 1995 United Nations address and Peace Rose presentation marked an unusual public recognition for an abstract painter, reflecting the spiritual and humanistic concerns that have run through his work and writing across his career. The 1997 retrospective at the New Mexico Museum of Art surveyed three decades of his Santa Fe practice, and the 2013 Santa Fe Art Dealers Association honor recognized his standing within the local artist community.
His later painting has continued to extend the vocabulary of his earlier work into new scales, materials, and subjects, and he has remained a central figure in the contemporary New Mexican art scene. His position today is that of one of the most accomplished living abstract painters working in the American Southwest, and his work has continued to be exhibited and collected internationally across more than fifty years of practice.