Scott Avett is a founding member of TheAvett Brothers, and many people in this area are familiar with their music, especially here on home turf, but not necessarily another side of his creativity — painting. He has a solo exhibit now through November 2 at the SoCo Gallery in Charlotte. This week, Avett sat down with WFAE's Woody Cain to talk about the exhibit.
Woody Cain: I'm really curious about the name of the exhibit, Purpose at Random. Tell me where that came from.
Scott Avett: That's referring to the subject matter in the show because I cover a lot of different ground as far as disciplines, as far as material and approaches to my painting. And I think as I was looking at the body of work, I was identifying or noticing that it was pretty random, but no less purposeful and no less clear in my personal dedication and commitment to it. So, it's just a comment on a very clear purpose coming from someone that may look very scattered to the viewer.
Cain: I think most people might be surprised that you didn't just wake up one day as a musician and say, ‘You know what, I want to paint,’ because your education includes a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from East Carolina University. But I also gather that, like many people in college, that wasn't necessarily the road that you thought you might go down. I read one interview that said originally you were thinking radio. Is that accurate?
Avett: I got a degree in communications with a concentration in radio broadcasting performance. I got the communications degree before I got the art degree, but I went initially for art. I got a little sidetracked and a little distracted, I suppose, and then fell back into, you know, to purpose really, even though I would say that radio broadcast and designing scripts like we would do back in the day, cut and splice editing — You probably did that. All that stuff.
Cain: Yes, sir!
Avett: And it was, it's no less art, it's no less creativity. So, you know, really, I was utilizing that anyway. And I utilize it in songwriting and, and narration still to this day.
Cain: Tell me about some of the paintings in this exhibit. You do a lot of the oil paintings. This exhibit has paintings from 2020 through the present, but one that really jumped off the page at me was peanut butter spread with sprinkles. And I thought most of us can relate to something like that, but when you see it, it really pops. I mean, that kind of gets back to the initial conversation about the name of the show.
Avett: Yeah, it does. This is something that in family life with young children, finding a piece of bread with peanut butter and sprinkles and then a piece of cheddar cheese on top of it, it looked so fun and so bizarre, but it's really just so commonplace. But when you see something like that, it's so much an expression of someone, of a human making this thing and doing this thing. And I just saw, I thought it was hilarious, so I took a picture of it, never thought another thing about it. But when I was making the work in this window of time and carrying on until now, somewhat, I was trying to disconnect myself from an intentional narrative and just to paint objects that I, for whatever reason, thought were interesting or funny or telling but not to know exactly why.
And in hindsight... I make up my own stories about them. It’s interesting the way that happens. It's really all about a trust in the process of discovery and a trust in the process of commitment. And that these truths or these narratives will come from these images regardless of our hand and our control in them, which we get so much control in so many other parts of our life. The drab, bureaucratic parts of our life, of control this, control that. So to let go and trust that the control is coming from another place.
Cain: How similar is the process in writing a song versus a painting? You mentioned the peanut butter with sprinkles on bread, and it's like, do you see something and go ‘I'd like to paint that’? Or is it more abstract in your mind in the beginning and it just kind of works itself out, you know, coming out like a splinter?
Avett: Well, the funny thing about the toast painting is that as the lockdown ended for us, when we were going back on the road, I was longing for the ability to still paint, the space to still paint. And so I'd been painting in these grids, and I wanted to take my paint with me on the bus, on the road. What I did was I took, if you'll see that painting, it's in multiple squares, so I would take each square with me and I would paint, like I'd take three blocks. They're eight by eight inches. I would take three blocks with me, and we might be out on the road with Willie Nelson, and then I'd be in the back of the bus painting one of these squares. When I'd come home, I would assemble it slowly. I would bring more pieces back. More pieces back. The reason I'm saying that is that similarity is that, I just needed an image to do that. To utilize that process, that space.
As an example for today, I heard a song on the way to my studio. I thought, ‘this is a song that I wanna record.’ Whatever that will do for me is beside the point and will only be in hindsight realized. So I'll just commit myself to recording this song from drums up, all the way to the backup vocals and the lead guitar. And then what will it tell me? What will I learn from it? Don't worry about whether it's a waste of time or a distraction, or what's the point, what album are you gonna put it on? Or where will it go? Forget all that stuff. Just the fact that be with it, be with the relationship, commit myself to it, and then let the, the giving happen and find out about myself. Really find, learn about myself through the process.
Cain: With a song you're recording or in your writing, you can just say, 'nah, this is not right' and start over. With a painting, if you get part of the way through, it's not like an Etch-a-Sketch where you can just kind of wipe it off. How do you fix it if you're not going the right way? You know what I'm getting at?
Avett: Totally. Well, you can’t just wipe it away. That is true. It's just a painting, and that's a hard bridge to cross, I suppose. As a younger person, it's harder. You want to erase everything, restart or throw it away. It’s tough, but sometimes, I mean, I have stacks of canvases that I push them to the limit and they just, they never yielded something that I would necessarily, that I personally didn't love what was happening and I just chalk them up to practice and chalk them up to experience. Then I take that with me to the next piece, or I re-stretch it or I paint over it, you know, or I throw paint at it, or I put it in the burn pile with the Christmas tree. We talk to the work and we have relationships with it. It guides us and tells us what needs to happen as well. As crazy as that sounds, it's true.
Cain: Before we finish, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a little more about the music side. I see you guys are going to be back for a home game, so to speak, on New Year's Eve, back at the Bojangles Coliseum. There's a lot of history there for you. I mean, I can remember the old days watching Carolina Cougars ABA games in that building, but you guys could play almost anywhere you wanted to in the world. What's special about playing at home on New Year's Eve? Because you kind of keep coming back.
Avett: Yeah, well we designed that years ago intentionally to allow for us to be home because at the time, it felt like we were gonna be gone forever, you know? And so we said, let's put in place a Southeast play for New Year's Eve. If we're gonna make a tradition or if we're gonna lean into a tradition , let's make it at least somewhat close!
We did that years ago. We used to play the Neighborhood Theatre, and that was where the first ones were. And then we've done Raleigh and Greensboro. I think it makes a lot of sense. It's a lot of work. You know, you’d think that a show at home would be easier, but it's really more to do and more difficult because there is lots of family and lots of friends that come out, but at the same time it's all those things in a good way.
As far as Bojangles is concerned, heck, not only did we see motocross there or I remember Seth and I going to see Soundgarden for his first concert ever back in the day. Reverend Horton Heat and Soundgarden.
Here's an interesting bit of history about that space that I think about every time I go. When my dad had a welding business, when he was a welder on bridges, I was 15 and he took me out to work with him, and I would end up working for him in some capacity, at least in the summers through school until I was about 22. The first bridge I ever worked on was the bridge that's right there over Independence (Boulevard).
I remember that I had a ball-peen hammer that I was beating angle iron with. I was very new to it and I had worn myself out toting decking. So heavy! I'm swinging this hammer and I remember it leaving my hand and watching it go down to Independence and thinking — and at the time they didn't have the same regulations that they do now to keep things from dropping on cars — and I remember seeing that hammer land right there on the dotted lines and cars going by. I just remember thinking, wow! I remember my dad leaving me there. He was going to another job and I was just left there to work.
I think about that, I think about how interesting the changes in life are, and the work in the arenas that we work in, no pun intended, you know, and how I've worked around that area. It's not just Bojangles, who's been there, what we've seen there. It's the heritage and the culture and the area as well. Very, very close to home when it comes to just working on the bridge that leads right into Bojangles, so that's incredible.
Scott Avett's "PURPOSE AT RANDOM" is at SoCo Gallery through Nov. 2, 2022.
