Skot Olsen

My love for the sea and the culture surrounding it began at a young age. I am pictured here, in 1970, being carried from the briny depths by my grandfather. Not only do we share a birthday, but we also share a love for art. It was he who first exposed me to painting, and to art in general. He taught me to use brushes and turpentine. He helped me paint my first real painting, a sailboat.

Shortly before this picture was taken, I was stung in the face by a jellyfish. It was a cold spring morning in Rhode Island and I was testing for my SCUBA certification in the open sea. Despite the frigid temperatures, I was all too happy to plunge from the rocky coast into the churning depths of the North Atlantic. That's when I got my first lesson that not everything in the sea was friendly. The test was a success and I went on to many years of undersea exploration. For some time, I wanted to be a marine biologist, and ultimately chose to pursue a career in the art world, enabling me to combine a love of marine research with a need to make pictures.

On month-long sailing trips with my parents around New England and all over the Caribbean, I developed a passion for the sea. We encountered many incredible things out there, including whales, huge sharks, and even witnessed the surprise emergence of a nuclear submarine. We weathered nor'easters on Nantucket and hurricanes in the West Indies. Having seen much of the world, my folks impressed upon me the importance of travel and the need to explore other cultures. They currently reside at the tip of South Africa, where the rough seas offer visitors spectacular views of enormous marine animals.

I once saw a sea monster. Well not really, but it taught me a lesson on photographing weird phenomena. My wife and I were hiking along the coast of north western Italy, in the Cinque Terra region, when we spotted some men setting up a telescope on a high cliff and aiming it toward the water. They claimed they could see a sea serpent, which I am pretty sure was an oar fish. The oar fish (looking very much like a serpent) is a 30-foot-long ribbon of a fish, and is responsible for many sea-serpent sightings. It is very rare to see one. Later that day, as we passed the same area by boat, I noticed the oar fish in the water and I had my camera ready. Although I could see it clearly and I was careful to snap the shot, all I got for a picture was the typical indistinguishable lumps that everyone gets when they take a picture of a sea monster.

After completing art school, my wife and I made our way to South Florida, where we currently reside, with our wonder-dog, Coco Bananas. I'm pictured here, engaged in one of my favorite Floridian activities, on Islamorada (in the Florida Keys). Florida is a fascinating place that is always surprising and challenging. Its diversity and seemingly limitless wilderness is often overlooked by the people who live here. Some of the most memorable and wonderful things I've ever seen have been in the Great State of Florida.

While on a trip to Amsterdam in 2006, I ate some hallucinogenic mushrooms. It was there that I had a vision about a new direction for my work, which I started when I returned home. I worked for a year on these neo-psychedelic paintings with the intention of showing them at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami during Art Basel, which I did. However, four days into the show, the gallery was gutted by a fire which consumed the work, along with several paintings from my Florida series. This event was tragic. Tragic for Harold Golen, who had invested so much to create the premiere gallery of its kind in Miami. Tragic for the art world in general, as the fire consumed one of the most important collections of modern artists in existence (including Ron English, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Christian Van Minnen, and Isabel Samaras). And tragic for me, as I lost more than 2 year years of work, but now that I have a better perspective of the event, I see that this unfortunate event was actually a blessing for me, as an artist and a person. The news spread quickly about the fire on December 11th, which generated a tremendous amount of support from fans, friends, and other artists. It was almost as if I'd had the opportunity to attend my own funeral (as morbid as that sounds!).

I will always be grateful to all of the wonderful people who reached out to me during that time. For me, the loss of 20 paintings in the blaze became a lesson on the impermanence of material objects, and the importance of friends and loved ones. Six of the pieces in that show were not photographed and are now only memories, which is fitting for work dealing with hallucinations and religion. This photo is of me working on the series and shows some of the only images remaining of work lost in the, now legendary, fire. Luckily, no one was injured in the conflagration.

Harold Golen is in the process of rebuilding, and the new gallery promises to outshine the former. I have resumed a maritime focus and am creating a new body of work, which will be unveiled at The Shooting Gallery in December. These paintings tend to combine the maritime element, with the dreamy quality of the religious-themed works. Each year, I plan to burn one of my paintings, to appease the fire gods.