Hamish Keith has stated, of Ian Scott’s early stark, bright imagery: ‘It was as if someone had turned on the light’. 5 Mini Skirts was painted in the second year of Ian Scott’s Girlie series produced between 1968 and 1970. Aged 24 at the time, Scottt was newly graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts and had been painting since he was a child. He had come of age during the 1960s, a decade in which an emboldened youth culture was both celebrated and feared. ‘Way out’, a slang expression ranging in meaning from fabulous to unconventional, was in use and the shift-style ‘mini’ skirt and dress became the height of fashion. Scott sourced his subjects from magazines like Vogue, fashion catalogues, ‘pin-ups’ and women’s magazines. He created bold, vivid visions of lithe, skimpily clad women, staged against often fancifully manicured landscapes. Leapaway Girl [Te Papa, 1969] is related to this seminal work. The subject in 5 Mini Skirts are not based on images of professional models and actors but, reportedly, on a Women’s Weekly photo of ‘teen queen’ beauty contestants. Only superficially referencing the popular culture imagery of advertising, the bright saturated colour of his “girlie” paintings made them stand out in a crowded art market. In Five Miniskirts, for example, four of the five women pose balanced on a brightly coloured and complicated arrangement of chairs and trestles. Depicting generic versions of the young dollybirds of the era, Scott developed complex compositions which were highly technical exercises in colour relationships, geometry and formal structure. . Completely self-possessed, they gaze out at the viewer beneath mops of carefully coiffured hair. Scott’s graduate thesis, titled New Realism, discusses his use of surrealism as: ‘the way in which the Pop painters use fantastic juxtaposition of objects and illogical changes in scale and perspective’. Engagement with the ‘low-art’ sources of pop art was also most unusual in New Zealand art. The artist was to move confidently between modes of representation and abstraction until his death in 2013.

Private Collection, Auckland