Dylan Olive
The Southern Editor
As the world is waking up and the sun is rising on Lake Hollingsworth, it is a common experience for Florida Southern students to wake up and witness a man painting the landscape in front of him by the water.
Scott West, hailing from Baton Rouge, La., is the man regularly seen painting, and he has completed roughly a thousand paintings of the various Polk County and Lakeland sceneries.
After moving around the southeast for a while, West landed in Orlando in ‘76 and moved to Lakeland in 2002, which is when he started getting more serious about his interests in art. Since ‘85, West has worked as a psychotherapist and now serves as an outpatient therapist at Peace River Center, where he’s worked the last 20 years.
“I found that there aren’t a lot of painters that paint outside in Lakeland, so I’m a big airpainter. I started to do it and people started to show interest,” West said. “This is kind of a way for me to chill after work and also get a little side income.”
Spots that West can be found painting include Lake Hollingsworth, the downtown area, Bartow and Fort Meade (though he sometimes searches for areas he’s never painted in in Polk County and goes to them). He would like to paint more at Lake Hunter and at Bonnet Springs Park because he has never been to the park.
Frequenting outside to paint, West has come across many creatures. Painting at a lake in the Circle B Bar Reserve, he heard a scurry and a splash in his ear. A hiker approached him and said, “That gator just crossed the path right behind you.” West responded, “Maybe he wanted to check out my painting.” Armadillos, sandhill cranes and other birds are other animals that have wandered into his space while painting.
Some of his favorite paintings over the last 20 years include one with the colorful metallic swans at Lake Morton and one that is an evening Christmas scene at Munn Park that makes the lights on the arches pop – nighttime is one of his favorite times to paint.
“I like alleyways at night because you see a lot of different colors, a lot of shading differences with color that’ll pop out,” West said.
While he also does pet and human portraits, he chooses to stick with outside landscapes and urbanscapes for his pleasure, and he likes a mix of the two. There are times where he has done commissions – he will always do a landscape commission he says – but he prefers working for himself rather than someone else because it becomes “tight and concerned.”
“Also different subject matters are what I look for, like ‘I’ve never painted that or I’ve never painted that,’” West said. “When you’re doing landscapes, you also have critters coming in, so I throw in some ducks or a bird or whatever.”
West typically paints around two to three canvases a month in two different time intervals. Split into six hours, he will paint one day for three hours and another day for three hours. His paintings consist primarily of acrylic paints, but he wants to start using oils again and incorporate watercolors. He tends to take his watercolor sketchbook with him to most places.
The size of his paintings varies, but the canvas size he most commonly paints with is a 16-by-20, and sometimes a 24-by-8 and a 2-by-3. West has started painting three 16-by-20 canvases at one location to have one landscape that spans across the three canvases to create a full scene.
“If you scan an area, you can always find something new to paint. I like Lake Hollingsworth ’cause of the people walking by that I can talk to, so there’s a social interaction that I like regarding Lake Hollingsworth and downtown,” West said.
Though most of West’s paintings come from Polk County landscapes, he has a few paintings on his website from The Finger Lakes region in New York. On a trip to Europe, he brought his sketchbook and returned to Lakeland to paint them.
On the back of the paintings, he includes a short description and title, the year, the medium and his name. He posts pictures of his paintings on his website and sells them in Lakeland at Bungalow Boutique and Gifts on South Florida Avenue.
“I know that when I retire, which will be five years, art will be a continuing job for me. I like that I have a hobby that I love that keeps me out and about and active,” West said. “I like to listen to music and dance when I’m painting. I’m a big-time new wave 1980s/70s kind of fan.”
