One of the most talented painters I know runs a ranch in South Park, Colorado. M Haynes Scott is the kind of artist who doesn't seek the spotlight — he's too busy living the life that feeds his work. His canvases carry the light and the silence of the high country in a way that only someone who has spent real time there can achieve.
South Park sits at roughly 9,000 feet in Park County, a broad open basin ringed by the Mosquito Range to the west and the Tarryall Mountains to the east. It is one of the largest alpine valleys in North America, and in winter it can be one of the coldest and most isolated places in Colorado. It is not an easy place to live. It is, however, an extraordinary place to paint.
Scott's work reflects that landscape honestly — the scale of it, the quality of the light at altitude, the way weather moves across an open basin. There's no sentimentality in his paintings, no postcard prettiness. What you see is what South Park actually looks like to someone who has ridden across it on horseback and worked cattle in it through a Colorado winter.
I've always believed that the best documentary work — whether film or photography or painting — comes from people who are genuinely part of the world they're depicting. Scott is that kind of artist. He isn't visiting the ranch life of the Colorado high country. He's living it. That authenticity comes through in every canvas.
The short film above gives you a glimpse of Scott and his work. It was produced as part of Mountain Magazine's ongoing effort to document the artists, musicians, and craftspeople who make their lives in Colorado's mountain communities — people whose work grows directly out of where they live and how they live.
If you have a chance to see Scott's paintings in person, take it. Reproductions don't do justice to the surface quality of his work or the way he handles light. He is, as I said, one of the most talented painters I know — and I've known a few.
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