Gilmore Scott (B. 1974) was born in Montezuma Creek, Utah. It is a small community east of Bluff and south of Blanding, Utah, near the Bear's Ear National Monument.
When I say it is a small community, I refer to the number of people that live there. The people who get their mail at Montezuma Creek live over a large geographic area encompassing everything from high desert to beautiful canyons. This narrow strip of land in Southeast Utah is part of the Navajo reservation.
This land butts up against the Colorado state line and the Ute Mountain Reservation. Montezuma Creek offers many opportunities for a landscape artist with the imagination of Gilmore Scott to stretch his boundaries. It is near the Hovenweep National Monument, the Canyons of the Ancients, The Navajo Twin Rocks, and the Valley of the Gods, all with spectacular rock formations filled with rock art.
Scott attended Eastern Utah University and then went to Utah State, majoring in fine art, before quitting to become a firefighter with the Forest Service.
It is not common knowledge, but members of many Southwest tribes, including the Navajo, the Zuni, and several Apache bands, have highly respected firefighting teams. But it is dangerous and challenging work, and after nine years, Scott returned to his artwork.
He is one of those artists I have never met, but I have enjoyed seeing his work for years. He is a talented painter, using acrylics, pencils, and watercolor. His artwork is well known and collected around the Four Corners area.
This painting is based on Kokopelli's rock art figure, considered the water carrier or trader. He supposedly traveled from small village to village in prehistoric times, bag on his back, playing his flute, trading his wares, and seducing maidens, hence his reputation as a symbol of fertility. You can find the figure of Kokopelli carved on canyon walls across the Southwest.
Scott looked at his reputation as a trader and bringer of goods and news to the people. What could be more natural than to paint the flute-playing Kokopelli in the center of a United States postage stamp with his shadow falling on prehistoric pottery shards? He was, after all, the first to carry messages and treasures across the Southwest. I love Gilmore Scott's creativity!
