The disruptive imagery of war
John Scott: Firestorm
by Dr. John O’Brian
Victoria: Figure 1 Publishing, 2024
$50 / 9781773272726
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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Many “art books” invite casual browsing. This book about artist John Scott is not such a book. The cover alone makes the point: in giant red block letters the artist’s name is planted above a roughly drawn image of a menacing fighter jet. And below that? Also in giant block letters, the terrifying word “Firestorm.”
Even the first few pages make clear that this is a demanding book. A few short paragraphs on the deep red inside cover lays out the deeply serious content. John Scott is identified by the years of his life (1949-2022) along with two of his main streams of images—graphically brutal war machinery and, in contrast, strange and vulnerable humanoids. Next, he is linked both to threatening political forces and parallel artistic movements. Finally, the book is framed as a companion to the first major exhibition of the artist’s war-themed works.
Each of next three pages is likewise arresting. The first thrusts at the reader a full-page photograph of an apparently amused young man with a disarmingly frank stare—crooked teeth and all. The next turn of the page reveals another striking photo, this time of a coarse, wall-sized painting of a cruise missile, along with the gashed words “Real Life (size),” a smear of mountains, and dotted lines evocative of militarily-precise directional calculations—and, standing beside the painting, an eerily bemused viewer holding a banal plastic bag. The last of these opening pages repeats the impact of the cover: “John Scott Fire Storm,” in red, covers the entire page.
Not just these pages, but the whole structure of the book is clearly designed for serious impact. A short foreword followed by an extensive written piece, interspersed with illustrations, carries the unsettling title: “John Scott and the Four Horsemen.” Following these two pieces is almost 90 pages of nothing but large reproductions and photos of strikingly raw paintings and 3D objects/sculptures. Two shorter, equally impactful, pieces conclude the book.
But this isn’t the end. After informative notes and, opposite the deep red end flyleaf, staring at the reader, is one of the artist’s much-used “bunny-eared” humanoids. With deeply poignant, huge, empty eyes, it holds a placard with the single word “Resist.” Behind, the faint word “why” drifts into the background. The effect is haunting.
Those who have seen the exhibition to which this book is the accompaniment will no doubt have one kind of approach to the book. Those not familiar with John Scott may feel most orientated by first reading through the biographical notes at the end. All readers, though, will find that the very way they see the images—and, indeed, think of the artist— will change as they read the text.
Though not intended to be a portrait of the artist, let alone a hagiography, the book will, for many readers, doubtless seem as much a portrait of a man as a record of a curated selection of his paintings. In fact, it is hard not to feel how deeply the artist’s personality and vision interconnect with his creations.
A foreword by Sarah Milroy, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, could hardly make this interconnection more memorably: “With a demeanour somewhere between that of a ribald gravedigger and a scurvy-racked pirate, he exuded joviality and menace in equal measure.” Significantly, she immediately places this extraordinary description in the context of her own responses to the nuclear age, and what she calls Scott’s “dark tidings.”
It may be helpful to jump ahead to the written pieces at the end of the book, since they, too, reinforce this double emphasis on social context and personality. In the first of these, “Beneath the Monsters,” historian of nuclear weaponry and events, Robert Jacobs, focuses almost entirely on the nightmarish realities behind Scott’s works (realities, he warns, still all too present.) His historical knowledge gives menacing substance, for example, to what he says of two of Scott’s paintings: “both present nuclear delivery systems that transit the sky like barely discernible apparitions, laden with death.”
Almost the opposite effect is created in the final piece, written by Senior Curator of Canadian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Richard William Hill. The personal and affable tone of his account of his first contacts with Scott, then teaching art in Ontario, is immediately evident in the title of his piece, “You Can Be Any John Scott You Like.” While recognizing that Scott’s ideas involved “a kind of social theorizing through art,” for the most part he recreates an engaging portrait of a generous-spirited, wildly eccentric, and restless artist. This was a man who “compulsively drew with paint on one sheet of paper after another”—and cooked preposterous meals.
Preceded by these end pieces, though, is the core of the book. By far the most substantial analysis is written by the organizer of the Scott exhibition, art historian and writer, John O’Brian. Offering a great number of perspectives, O’Brian draws on a wealth of materials, not just diverse art works, but biographical details, the words of art critics, and illuminating movements in art and society. He also gives immediacy to his piece by tapping into the fact that Scott himself spoke and wrote in such a forthcoming way, both creatively and personally.
The way the reader responds to this multifaceted view of the artist and his work is much affected by several of O’Brian’s choices. Most fundamental, perhaps, is the fact that he deliberately eschews chronology—as he did in arranging the original exhibition. Why? “Scott was unruly in art, as in life, and rarely worked in a predictable way.” Simultaneously, though, to create a sense of an analytical framework, he subdivides his writing with headings like “Storylines,” “Masculine/Feminine,” “Trans-Am Apocalypse,” “Existential Threat,” “Beirut,” “Diane Frankenstein,” and “Controversy.” The fact that the evocative headings are clearly not any more conceptually parallel than they are chronological says a lot about the methods behind this densely charged writing.
Those who know anything about Scott will recognize many of the best known elements of his life and art. Amongst these are Scott’s ceaseless image-making using charcoal on cheap varsol-soaked paper, his working class background, and his problems with addiction and health. Above all, though, O’Brian emphasizes his images of weaponry and perhaps his most famous single work, a full-sized Trans Am car incised with the words from the biblical apocalypse.
At the same time, though, his writing balloons off into multiple directions. Some of the most effective writing is in his sharply focused analyses of particular works and the way they make their effect: “In Damn, 1995 …the artist paints round eyes on the turret of a tank that mirror the turning wheels of the vehicle. The eyes and wheels play off one another visually and metaphorically, making the tank seem alive.” This is the kind of writing which allows the reader to see beyond the surfaces of Scott’s images and to take that deepened vision to the rest of the illustrations in the book.
A related kind of writing involves much more thematic interpretation, sometimes O’Brian’s own, sometimes that of another. Of the painting called Dark Commander, for example, where a Napoleonic figure is surrounded by numbers and letters, the author reports a third-party interpretation: “The owner of the painting argues that the ubiquitous array of numbers and letters represents the algorithms and data that drive machines in contemporary society.”
A third stream of analytical writing draws extensively from art critics, whether they are commenting on particular techniques, social implications, or difficult interpretations. Thus, for example, he quotes the critic Jay Scott for what he identifies as both the aesthetic and psychological impact of Scott’s paintings. In the critic’s words, the artist’s works are “fast and furious and uncompromising, rubber laid down on hard road, skid marks across the psyche.”
Important for the sense of depth and seriousness of this part of the book, though, is the fact that O’Brian reports not just encomiums but also the opposite. Most striking amongst many is what he quotes from a critic, John Bentley Mays, accusing Scott of indulging in “artistic tantrums,” and “apocalyptic chic.” Especially eye-popping for some readers, doubtless, will be the author’s documenting Mays’ response to a work called Selbst. In this work the artist displayed a piece of surgically removed skin from his own thigh, and had it tattooed with symbolic numbers. In this case, O’Brian merely reports—without challenging—Mays’ view that the entire show was “exceedingly disagreeable.” In fact, the author often similarly reports critics directly, without either challenging or endorsing their views, though he does allow at one point that “[a]pparently, the critics were unable to discern” the true import of a particular work.
O’Brian often uses Scott’s own words to especially memorable effect. Originally hoping to become a writer rather than visual artist, Scott left great stores of his own words, both in interviews and in creative writing. The author chooses amongst these perhaps the most unusual work, a novella called Diane Frankenstein, written as a kind of “feminist interpretation of Shelley’s story as an artist concerned as much with gendered imbalances of power as with power imbalances in general.” In Scott’s own words, “Diane Frankenstein is a working class kid, like me. By strength of will, she pulled herself up.” Scott’s comments elsewhere on social issues punctuate O’Brian’s piece. “Blood is the lubricant of the modern industrial world,” he quotes Scott saying at one point, and, at another (concerning television) reports his claim that “central moments of life—birth, death, sex, conflict, combat [are] moments we can only attempt to convey through metaphor and symbol…”
Two other main streams of writing will, for some, be the most significant. Describing Scott, wonderfully, as “[d]issident, artist, fabulist, critic, writer, autodidact, motorcycle enthusiast, cross-dresser, art professor, antagonist of power and empire,” O’Brian brings to life key points of Scott’s biography. Perhaps most singular of these he documents in the section called “Beirut.” “Jolted” by negative criticism of his lack of direct experience of the military violence he deplored, Scott “acquired a dangerously fast motorcycle and made plans to travel to war torn Beirut in Lebanon.” What the artist experienced there, in the author’s terms, “remained imprinted in his mind long after he came back to Toronto.”
The second of these two remaining streams of writing in this part of the book arises from O’Brian’s depth of knowledge both about society and art. Readers who come to the book with only scant knowledge of, say, Expressionism, or, more likely, Neo Expressionism, will, after O’Brian’s explanations, find themselves better equipped to respond to Scott’s work. Likewise, he provides background information on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Picasso’s Guernica, and the iconic, popular movie Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. Nowhere does the author become more determined to inform his readers of a context to Scott’s work, though, than in what he explains, passionately, angrily, about the Canadian government’s complicit acquiescence in the 1980s to the U.S. development of the cruise missile programme. It says much about the final impact O’Brian wishes to leave on his readers that his introduction to the exhibition of Scott’s works concludes with a deeply felt and resonant analysis of Scott’s terrifying painting, Second Strike.
What follows O’Brian’s piece and forms the rest of the book’s core is page after page of Scott’s brutally—but also subtly— evocative images of the “industrial war machine” of the nuclear age, and, equally its impact on the vulnerable. Only occasionally charged with one or two colours (never purple it seems), the largely black images, like the artist’s personality itself, can’t help but leave an indelible impression. No doubt those who were able to see the exhibition will have had an enriching experience. Those, however, who have immersed themselves in this thoughtfully and purposefully crafted book will likewise leave its pages enriched.
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Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island, Volume 2: Nanaimo North to Strathcona Park (RMB, 2025, Revised Edition, reviewed by Amy Tucker). Recently, he’s reviewed books by Madeleine Thien, Tim Bowling, Stephen L. Howard, Michael Whatling, Frank Wolf, and George Zukermany for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster