ARTIST STATEMENT (Winter 2025)
In my work, I excavate the delicate territory between childhood wonder and the edges of danger—a space I first discovered in my own backyard experiments with fireworks and homemade potato cannons. These early adventures weren't merely acts of rebellion; they were my first encounters with the profound questions that continue to drive my artistic practice: Where does play end and peril begin? What transforms a hazard into an opportunity for discovery?
Growing up in an era of unsupervised exploration, I found myself drawn to the thrill of testing boundaries. Each improvised experiment, whether successful or ending in a spectacular failure, became a lesson in understanding risk, consequence, and the raw joy of discovery. These experiences weren't just about the excitement of the moment—they were fundamental exercises in understanding cause and effect, in learning to calculate risk while maintaining that essential spark of curiosity that defines childhood.
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" watercolors to larger pieces reaching 8 feet wide. I also construct inert "fireworks" from book binding board, watercolor paper, glue, 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 possibility, 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 installations 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 childhood has 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 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.
My meticulously rendered, labyrinthine architectural drawings offer an invitation for viewers to navigate on their own playful 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.
Drawing at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in Spring, 2017. Photo by William Teplin
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.
Working in his EFA studio, 2016
The backbone to Teplin's work lies within his sketchbooks, of which he is so particular that he hand-binds each one, from scratch.
What Someone Once Said
Scott Teplin’s artwork stimulates the brain and excites the eye by merging a variety of dimensional Nature-Physical concepts with humor and masterful manipulation of media. His fascination with biodiversity and relationships of seemingly disparate natural subjects can be found in several of his series, such as his botanical and internal organ watercolors where similarities between botany and bilious organs become comically intertwined. He is always dissecting his subjects on paper as he asks, “What’s inside?” His insatiable curiosity comes through with roofless architectural drawings where the viewer gets completely lost inside impossibly detailed structures. His masterful use of line and color through his practiced use of traditional pen & ink and watercolor turns what could have been grotesque into beautifully considered and often hilarious compositions.
Wisconsin, 1978 - never happier
