One could call him a loner. Local artist Skot Horn’s work has been shown in almost every gallery in Toledo, but the man himself remains curiously alone. A Fremont native, Horn moved to Chicago to study art and lived there for ten years before moving back to Toledo. “I came here just for a visit and I still haven’t unpacked my bags. That was in 1989.”
Horn has shared studios with many artists before settling in the Secor building on Jefferson. But he’s been nomadic even inside of that building, bouncing from one floor to another. At present, his studio sits at one end of the tenth floor, surrounded by empty rooms. “I like where I’m at,” Horn said. “No matter what I do I’m alone, but that’s good. I can’t draw and socialize at the same time— you only have so much time in a day.” Alone in his tower, Skot Horn works away. Hence the name of his new exhibit, “Drawing From the Tenth Floor,” to be displayed at the Hudson Gallery.
In his perch, Skot Horn observes the world around him. “I sit and watch, and draw what I watch —people, buildings — and then when I work on it long enough it becomes abstract, but underneath it’s still a figure.” Some of his work resembles images grade school children would draw on a sidewalk in chalk during recess, which is precisely the point. Horn enjoys children’s drawings. “I like the freeness of it, the whimsy. I try to be spontaneous, like a child when I draw.” That desire for freeness shows up in all his artistic choices. For example, rather than be meticulous to avid-ruining a $200 piece of canvass, Horn goes through many sheets of paper in a day, without worry.
Horn has worked in many other mediums in the past, including ceramics and wood, but has been focusing on 2D art for some time. “Drawing is so immediate. I can do a few of them right in a row […] I try to do as many as I can in a sitting.” The exhibit at Hudson Gallery will focus on drawings from the last year of Horn’s life. Drawings is a loose term: Horn goes back over his work with a variety of paints, oil sticks and other mediums.
Horn’s work has become highly collectible over the years, but the artist has no opinion of his own sales figures. He’s his own worst critic: “Usually, I hate everything I do. When I’m done with a painting I want to throw it away.” Skot says when he first tried his hand at pottery he threw away hundreds of pieces, which friends and other artists would pick out of the trash and then display. Nor does he have much to say about his own process; Horn says he usually forgets creating a painting while he makes it. “The creative process is a little bit painful.” Since then, Horn has learned to give his work time: he’s found those thrown-away pieces in the homes of his friends, and liked them. Toledo art fans can celebrate Horn’s new artistic thriftiness with him at the Hudson Gallery in downtown Sylvania on Friday, March 8. “Drawing From the 10th Floor,” an exhibit of Skot Horn’s work, will have its opening reception on Friday, March 8 from 6-8pm, through Saturday, April 6. Free. Hudson Gallery, 5645 N. Main St., Sylvania. 419-885-8381. www.hudsongallery.net.
