ARTIST STATEMENT (SPRING 2025)
My work explores the nature of learning and discovery, emphasizing how curiosity, risk, and play are essential to understanding the world. I believe that meaningful learning often happens in moments where caution meets courage—where mistakes and surprises aren’t failures but important steps toward insight.
Humor plays a vital role in my practice. I use playful, mischievous details to invite viewers to engage with my work in a lighthearted way, even as it touches on serious themes like control, chaos, and the limits of safety. I find that humor opens a space for wonder and openness, reminding us that learning isn’t just a serious pursuit but also an imaginative and enjoyable process.
By blending precision with absurdity, and order with unpredictability, I aim to celebrate the joyful tension that comes with discovery. For me, the most profound learning happens when we allow ourselves to be curious, to question, and to laugh at the unexpected - embracing the messy, unpredictable nature of growth. My pieces are invitations to reconnect with that playful spirit of inquiry that fuels creativity and resilience throughout life.
Growing up unsupervised I was drawn to testing boundaries, and each experiment, regardless of outcome, taught me about risk, consequence, and the joy of discovery. These revelations were fundamental to understanding cause and effect and calculating risk while maintaining childhood curiosity.
To capture these moments and explore these complex themes, I work with drawing, watercolor, and India ink, creating works on paper that range in size from intimate 5" x 7" drawings to larger pieces reaching 8 feet wide. I also construct inert "fireworks" from paper, fuse and glassine. These sculptural elements, devoid of any explosive potential, serve as metaphors for the controlled exploration of risk, the excitement of potential chaotic energy.
Today, my artistic practice serves as a bridge between these formative experiences and my adult understanding of their significance. Through my work, I seek to capture that precise moment when a child's eyes widen with potential, when the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. My pieces often incorporate elements that seem to teeter on the edge of reality - familiar objects reimagined through the lens of youthful imagination, where everyday items become portals to fantastic possibilities.
The tension between safety and discovery remains a central theme in my work. I'm fascinated by how children naturally navigate this balance, often with more wisdom than we give them credit for. My drawings and sculptures frequently play with scale and perspective, creating environments that evoke both the physical and emotional landscape of childhood experimentation.
In an age where formative years have become increasingly structured and risk-averse, my work stands as a testament to the value of unscripted discovery. It celebrates those precious moments of independent exploration that shape not just our understanding of the physical world, but our capacity for creative problem-solving and resilient thinking.
Through my art, I invite viewers to reconnect with their own memories of childhood daring, to remember the electric thrill of pushing boundaries and the profound learning that comes from testing limits. Each piece serves as a reminder that growth often happens in that exhilarating space between caution and courage, where curiosity leads the way and discovery awaits those brave enough to explore.
My isometric drawings offer an invitation for viewers to navigate on their own terms. In this series, which began in the early 1990’s, I’ve attempted to merge the tight boundaries of isometric composition with the personality that inhabits the space. More recently I’ve tried to stretch the margins further by incorporating impossible elements reminiscent of Oscar Reutersvärd, MC Echer, Roger Penrose.
My crash drawings start with news photos: explosions, crashes and accidents which I collage together. I then use the collage as a reference to make line drawings. Those line drawings are again collaged together several more times in order to complete a final drawing.
Unlit fireworks embody potential energy in its purest form. They are ephemeral, cross-cultural expressions of creativity, often exhibiting exquisite printing and ingenious design. As a child, I was captivated by fireworks. A significant part of their allure lay in the ability to hold this unpredictable object, fostering a sense of control and power over a potentially dangerous event. My journey as an artist began with fireworks. The limited ways to "play" with fireworks led me to disassemble my secret stash in my room, under the guise of "doing homework." I would combine powders and cardboard tubes to create new, imaginative charges.
BIOGRAPHY
Scott Teplin was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin but has been living in New York City since 1995. While he largely avoided art classes as a young student, he began to shape his creative identity in his teens through boundary testing endeavors like dissecting fireworks, then creating new ones and making his own clothes. These early playful, imaginative, and sometimes risky pursuits continue to inform his work today.
Discovering the medium of watercolor during a year of study in Europe was transformative for Teplin. This set him on a path that gained footing through earning a BS degree in Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MFA in printmaking at University of Washington.
Teplin has exhibited world-wide in Museums and commercial galleries since 1998. His work is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art (NY and SF), The New Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Spencer Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Smithsonian Institution, Altoids Collection, New York Public Library, Phoenix Public Library, MIT, University of Virginia, Cornell University, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Wesleyan University, Stanford University, The California College of Arts and Crafts, University of Iowa, Occidental College, Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital, Turku University Hospital - Finland, Penn and Teller, and Progressive Insurance.
My botanical series explores the interplay between order and chaos, mutation and evolution. I depict fantastical flowers set against backgrounds that use a system of grids as a framework. Established order is broken allowing for unpredictable results to emerge. The tension between the rigid grid and the organic, mutated flowers invites the viewer to contemplate the balance between the planned and the spontaneous. By layering these mutated flowers over the systematically created backgrounds, parallels between the creative process and the mechanisms of evolutionary adaptation emerge
