"Please Tell THE BLACK COLLEGIAN's readers about your artistic views and creative process."

My art is a continuum that not only goes forward, but backwards. All of my art is a part of
my collective, artistic memory. I can return to sketchbooks that I did 35 years ago thinking that I did them this morning. Sketchbooks I did 35 years ago are as recent in my memory as sketchbooks I did last week.

If I had to explain what I do, if I had to put a title on myself, I would say that as a visual artist, I am a polyrhythmic storyteller. Polyrhythmic means that a lot of rhythmic patterns go on simultaneously in a story, so an artist gets a story that is useful in many ways. Another aspect
that explains my art started about 40 years ago. When I got out of graduate school and began teaching, I was looking for a continuum, something to connect my art to that of other African-
American artists. It dawned on me that in the visual arts African-American artists have no continuum.

When we were brought from Africa in slavery, our visual tradition was taken. The drums, the sculpture, the things that we did were taken, and we had to make "stuff" to serve other people. We couldn't make drums anymore because they were dangerous. We had to do brickwork, plasterwork, woodwork to embellish the homes and things of other people, and that's what we did. So as I looked for visual continuum, I couldn't find any in the visual arts.

Some artists refer to the Harlem Renaissance as a period during which African-American visual, musical, and literary art flourished. The Harlem Renaissance started in the twenties. What about the one hundred years before that? What dawned on me was that the only artists of African descent who have kept an artistic continuum are the musicians. Now, people ask "how?" Well, we were given instruments to entertain other people by day, but nobody watched us at night. We put the language that was in our souls in those instruments at night. At night we were playing music for ourselves, not to entertain the man. Therefore, I decided I should start looking at musicians. I started observing people like Monk, Mingus, Miles, Lewis, Ellington, and Basie and discovered that there was a whole continuum of language in their music that the visual artists had missed.

Even if they were trying to visualize the music, they missed the philosophy of the music. Let me explain: I concluded that there are three ways that we think. Most of us think linearly, one idea over another. Some of us think "planerly," ideas related to each other on a plane. Jazz musicians see a third way, what I call spiral thinking. For example, jazz musicians are always in the "now" while you are hearing them. These guys have an uncanny ability to understand what they have  done. You might describe what they have already done as yesterday, history, the past. You
might describe what they are doing now as the present. They also have an unbelievable anticipation of what is about to happen – the future, tomorrow. As jazz musicians, they present
the three as a single moment of artistic time, fusing the present, the past and the future. Another way of saying it is that this fusion is a spiral rooted in the past, but reaching into the future.

Imagine that every idea that was or will be is a glass globe and that you are suspended in the middle of that globe. If you look up, you don't think down because you know that what you see up is connected to what is down. If you move forward, you don't think backwards because forward and backward are connected. This idea of the spiral of connectivity became my operating philosophy. And that operating philosophy came to musicians, not visual artists. So
when I am working with a historical idea, I am thinking about the historical idea, its past, its present and its future, all at one time. I got this from musicians; I couldn't get it from visual artists
because the continuum for visual artists was broken with slavery, probably forever. That is how I work, and that is the philosophy behind my art.

My artistic life, my art, has been enduring. It has been sustaining. To explain those, I refer to my teaching at Xavier University for 40 years. During that time, all I have learned is how much I don't know. When I go into a classroom, I don't go into it with what I know. I go into it with what I don't know. My doing so means I can learn, and my mother once told me that if I go
into a situation already saying I know it, I am saying that I am incapable of learning. So my art and my teaching are both based on the fact that there is so much I don't know, that every day I am learning. Every day I have something to create. That is how I think of my life as an artist.

I have created many works of art over the years, but I don't have a favorite work. At my last show, Circle Dance at the New Orleans Museum of Art, someone asked, "How would you describe yourself?" I said, "Imagine that you have walked in a desert for years. Finally in the middle of it, you see a hill you climb. At the top you look back and see years of footprints that you made getting to the hill. You stand on the hill and admire those footprints. Then you turn around and start walking again." Well… all of the stuff that I have done to this point in my life is
nothing more than the footprints of my life, but I don’t turn around and admire my footprints. I am in the process of making new ones.

John Scott is a MacArthur Fellow whose works appear in many major art museums. He has taught art at Xavier University, his alma mater, for 40 years. He has taught printmaking at La Sorbonne, University of Michigan, University of Georgia, and at a high school in Jamaica.