Staying Alive: Interview with Jamie Scott-Dyson
Jamie Scott-Dyson talks about his exhibition 'Staying Alive', opening at New Glasgow Society next month.
Alex: I think the idea of a body of work being so vital that it is Staying Alive is so apt for your recent paintings. How did you arrive at that title, and how does it connect to the works in the show?
Jamie: Staying Alive describes how I feel about making work at the moment. That title partly comes from the fact that, for a while after moving to Glasgow from London via York, I made little to no work. When I was younger, I used to be able to stay up painting until four in the morning, wake up feeling fine (and also feel fine about not waking up until half eleven).
The oil paintings I produced at that time always felt like the end of a 72-hour marathon. I’d consistently be searching for a ‘I cant do anything more and I’m happy with it’ feeling, a resolution or endpoint when everything sat on the precipice of coming together but wasn’t too refined. I wanted the works to be as legible as a catchy image while still pumping with life. In the frenzy of that marathon mode, all the choices made during the painting would accumulate into something visually genuine, something grown out of the process and carrying evidence of the time embedded in it. It was not as though I had predetermined the outcome and then set about completing it like a builder following a blueprint.
Though I admittedly prefer the result of this ’marathon-mode’ – it is undeniably hard to sustain. I don’t recall washing my clothes very much when painting like this, or having any money, or going on holidays, or seeing friends, or making proper meals, or exercising.
Alex: Yes, it must have felt unsustainable?
Jamie: Completely. So the paintings I am making now feel like a temporary, healthier compromise. I tried returning to the treadmill of oil on wood and canvas, but I could never recover that ’marathon mode’ where things seemed to emerge organically. Because it was not working, I began to think that I had dried up or could no longer sustain that level of attention.
At the same time, I realised I would genuinely rather keep the healthier mental state I had cultivated during the years when I made little art than return to the shit-show of my early to mid-twenties, even if I had been more productive then. Gradually, though, I began to miss painting. Going back to the studio for the first time in months and feeling that I had allowed the internal fields to become fallow wasn’t good.
But I’m slow and stubborn so the basic act of altering my process to yield results took time. I suppose when the work comes from a mysterious pool inside it cant simply be hurried along to a different lane, there’s a sort of no-mind slow courting going on internally I think.
Alex: So Staying Alive is a maxim? It had to be this way for the good of both yourself and the work?
Jamie: Yes! Part of staying alive is having the want, you’ve got to want it, feel like your chasing something, building a new mound to survey your bounds. But the danger of leaving it too long is that I become a tribute act to myself. Muscle memory takes over and I find myself making work that looks like ‘work Jamie would make’.
The irony is that any past work I genuinely liked came through guesswork and the feeling of pushing into a small new space. Chasing how the work looked in the past would immediately remove the vitality that made it acceptable in the first place.
So, for me, staying alive means finding a way to fit painting into my life without allowing it to become a cute pastime. I still need it to be part of some meandering internal progression. I have to keep producing things, even when I am not particularly impressed by the results. As long as the work feels like a genuine continuation or excursion from where I was, rather than a tribute act, it remains alive. I “don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard”, as Paul Simon says.
Alex: The transition away from canvas, oil and wood makes sense, then. Does the immediacy of acrylic and paper bring you closer to the speed of the marathon?
Jamie: I went with what did not annoy the shit out of me. It turns out that endless failure which stinks and stains your clothes can become tiring (oil paint). So I wanted some results from the work, or at least a sense that it was moving in any direction. With oil, when something is not working and I have run out of space, I just scrape it out. It remains wet for so long that choices matter more.
At first, acrylic did not feel like going all the way, but something was better than nothing. And with acrylic, I can edit more freely. I can leave the parts I like, carry them into a new image, make mistakes and try again at a faster rate. It is a medium that suits low confidence and somebody who wants to be home for dinner, as I can stop and pick up again where I left off. In that sense, the medium became a physical embodiment of alternatives to all the places where I had previously become stuck.
That is why I see this body of work as evidence that I have successfully stayed alive. The works are here; they exist. Looking back, I came close to giving up painting, but now the work feels as though it is kicking again. It’s moving and it’s this acrylic on paper methodology that’s carried it there. I do not feel as though I am firing on all cylinders yet, but I will take what I am able to make within the margins of where my life is at the moment.
In life, you are always carrying a flame. Sometimes it is a tea light and sometimes it is a burning house. Circumstance and degrees of freedom tend to dictate its size, and I generally feel all right with that. It’s a balance to measure all the elements of my routine; Walking to the studio, drinking coffee and being engaged with something that isn’t my phone, while also managing the thought that adding another painting to the stack would be nice.
Alex: Amongst all of this, recognisable images do seem to pull through. I kept thinking that one of the works almost looked like a fry-up, for instance. Are those kinds of associations intentional, or do they emerge afterwards?
Jamie: It would be funny if it were intentional, wouldn’t it? Hungry boy dreams of food. But really, the final image is always a result of the process: a lot of cause and effect adding up to something I like, or something I do not mind but which has taken so long that it is time to move on to the next one.
Naturally ‘solids’ emerge – in that I’m making marks and splotches of colour for a while, looking for a sense of order, something to latch onto. The simple enjoyment of just moving paint around can be endlessly enjoyable, but I’m striving to mould these marks into something connected, editing out noise to focus certain parts, tweaking the whole so its tone is swaying collectively in time. That feels like ascension, like forward movement.
At the same time, I still think of the work as a form of storytelling or portraiture because I came from a more obviously figurative past. The way paintings change over time feels like a repeated process of loosening your fist to allow new things in, then tightening it again to absorb what you have found. Within that analogy, you have to imagine the essence of previous styles being absorbed into the skin, blood and bones of the hand doing the grasping and releasing. So the logic that directed my older figurative work still has a say in the current process. What remains is an attempt to tap into a very basic kind of storytelling: one blob’s relationship to another blob, and the way that mark-making and palette combine with that relationship to create a mood.
Alex: These paintings feel very alive: organic forms, energy fields, a kind of pulse running through them, as though they are justifying their own existence through the act of being made. Do you think about the paintings as carrying or describing a particular energy while you are making them?
Jamie: That is an interesting way of looking at them, and perhaps my fairly lax approach to using my thinking mind while working is part of what makes them look that way.
There is a fragment from the Upanishads, a collection of ancient Sanskrit texts, which I read years ago and which has burrowed its way into the centre of my outlook: “thou art that”.
I understand the line as saying that whatever you consider to be nature, you are that as well. We generally inherit a worldview in which human beings are positioned as a kind of non-nature-based camera operator, standing outside and observing everything else. But as I began to unpack that way of seeing, “thou art that” made much more sense to me. It felt as though I had been given a ladder down from the balcony of cluttered subjectivity into a more fundamental truth. Once absorbed, that truth could begin to reshape whatever subjective material passed through me.
For such a small line, it had a significant effect on me. So your question about the paintings carrying an energy resonates with that idea. If we are nature, and it is mainly the mind that creates the distinction between us and it, then when the conscious mind recedes during the process of making, art can feel like the force of nature extending itself onto paper through materials. It becomes a sort of dead end where that force of nature meditates on itself.
So it is less that I am interested in nature and organic forms and the work is a reflection of research, and more that I consider myself to be of that stuff. When nature’s boundless creativity is given some paint, perhaps it simply continues doing its thing. Obviously, I do not walk around thinking like this day to day, or even think about painting this way while I am doing it. I just work. But when I am asked to pick the process apart, this feels like the most logical answer.
Alex: I personally find that describing paintings as existing “between presence and absence” can be a lazy formulation, but I genuinely feel it in these works. They seem to capture moments of in-betweenness, as though they are scraping thoughts or images from somewhere half-formed. I suppose that also resonates with your own experience of being in a period of transition with the work. Does that connect with how you think about them?
Jamie: I remember us speaking before about the way the work has transformed. You described the earlier paintings as a kind of dead totem, whereas these have become more floaty and scattered.
That could be some autobiography of the unconscious, although that territory feels beyond me. But I do think there is something satisfying about walking into a room and encountering a painting which looks as though it is in the middle of something. It feels as though you could press play and it would unpause and continue whatever it was doing.
There is a satisfying tension in managing, when you are lucky, to capture movement within an inherently static medium. When I think about the paintings that feel like failures, they are often the ones I feel I have “completed”. They lack the movement or transition you are describing. Watching somebody striving in the middle of a marathon is probably more dramatic than seeing them sitting down and drinking water after it has finished. In the same way, I tend to find the first act of a film most exciting, when everything is still in the air and its shape has not yet established itself.
Even in conversation, I am often more engaged by friends who are searching for a point and seem uncertain than by people who are plainly sure of themselves. Resolution can sometimes be dull.
That connects with something my friend Libby once said to me. I was in this limbo of writing lyrics and trying to pin down every possible idea for a song. I wanted a complete map of the next album, so that the actual writing would simply involve filling in blanks that had already been decided thematically. But when I told Libby that I was struggling to fill those blanks, they suggested thinking of writing as asking a question rather than confirming an answer.
That is also how I try to enter the painting process. If you approach creativity as an opportunity to explore rather than confirm something already decided, the work is likely to reflect that openness.
Alex: Do you find your music feeding into the paintings in any other direct way? It seems as though there is a shared creative ethos emerging across both strands of your practice.
Jamie: I think there are all sorts of ways in which they overlap because, at their core, they come from the same space.
Both are about creating a feeling that unfolds, honing something ephemeral and attempting to capture life through a medium. They both require a balance between attending to the smallest details and then zooming out to curate and structure the work as a whole.
But at the same time, they operate very differently. The moment of discovering something musical at the piano happens quickly and has to be acted upon quickly. It is like a portal opening temporarily in my head, and I have to make the most of it while it remains open. Painting generally moves at a much slower pace.
Alex: Except during those marathon periods? It is interesting how they involve very different modes of creativity.
Jamie: Yes, except during those marathon periods.
I also think there is a degree of the entertainer in me, and music informs the paintings in that respect. When recording, you have to cosplay as the listener to some degree. I find myself doing the same thing as the viewer when painting.
Details matter to the construction of the whole, but you cannot become too pleased with small details that would mean nothing to somebody casually listening or passing by the work. I often think about what a painting looks like on a relatively superficial level as much as I care about it on a deeper one, and I suspect that comes from making music.
Alex: Do you find influence in the work of other artists too? I can see traces of Forrest Bess, Joan Miró and Ken Kiff across the work, or at least moments which made me think of them. Were any particular artists, writers, musicians or other influences orbiting these recent paintings while you were making them?
Jamie: Those artists float through my head, along with Lee Lozano, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, whom I especially love. But what I take from other artists has changed over time. When I was younger, I had a raw desire to emulate. That can be a productive mode because you are a less specific and defined person and therefore have a greater capacity to shapeshift. While temporarily wearing those identities and making those marks, you begin to learn more about yourself. It becomes a subconscious process of self-identification. You search for yourself in a free and frantic way and latch on to whatever feels internally familiar. But with experience, emulation begins to sit less comfortably.
To be honest, I do not look at the artists you mentioned very much now. Returning to the idea of Staying Alive, looking to other artists for inspiration can sometimes hinder me more than it helps. Although I am still a relatively young artist, I feel that I have tapped into my own specific little niche, something I want to continue cultivating. Shifting styles and chasing art histories no longer works for me. It feels like a folly.
And when you are trying to stay alive, you cling to anything that feels solid enough to allow future growth. I have to remain focused on finding what feels true for me, and looking too closely at other artists can distract me from that, or simply leave me discouraged by how good they are and how bad I can feel about my own work. So my hope, when my work feels akin to that of another artist from history, is that we are simply occupying a similar space. Perhaps we share particular interests or kindred beliefs about painting and life, and those beliefs lead towards a related kind of image.
Maybe we are all barking up a similar tree, just from different sides.
Jamie Scott-Dyson’s exhibition, Staying Alive, is at New Glasgow Society, 1307 Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8TL
Private view: Friday 24 July 2026, 5-11pm
Open: Saturday 25 July 2026, 10am-6pm | Free entry
Alexander Harding