Brief Review: Illuminations: Scott Prior at the Cahoon Museum

Each time I bring my cocker spaniel to the vet’s office I am mesmerized by an MFA poster that shows a young woman wearing a plaid flannel bathrobe sitting with an Irish setter at her feet that hangs in the waiting room. It, I discovered, is the work of Scott Prior whose combined technical ability and homespun subject matter I find uniquely appealing. Unfortunately, I’ve learned how infrequently the Northampton, Massachusetts-based Prior’s work is shown beyond local galleries. So, when I heard that Cape Cod’s Cahoon Museum of American Art had scheduled a Prior 5-decade retrospective for early spring 2021, I knew I had to make the trip.

The Cahoon Museum was once the home of Cape Cod folk artists, Martha and Ralph Cahoon. It is easy to imagine that the well-maintained rooms once served as a living space, a fact that both enhanced and restricted appreciation of the 35 Prior paintings on display. Prior’s depiction of domestic scenes, often focusing on such mundane objects as bear-shaped honey dispensers, baking powder containers and a seemingly ever-present Mr. Peanut figurine have a natural affinity for the wood-plank floored and low-ceilinged rooms of the Cahoon cottage. This fact was underscored by a display case that held many of Prior’s actual studio props. However, although I realize I’ve probably been spoiled by larger museums’ exhibits, I feel that the luminescence Prior achieves in his painting is best appreciated in his large-scale works and that these deserve to be seen in a setting where they are not competing for the viewer’s attention with paintings that are hung less than a foot away.

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