Scott Belville
Taped Fragments, Unfinished Stories
Scott Belville’s work invites sustained looking. His canvases are dense with layers—of paint, of cultural memory, of metaphor—and reward the kind of thoughtful, open-ended interpretation often associated with poetry or dreams. A figure of enduring relevance in the American South, Belville has spent over four decades refining a visual language that blends rigorous academic technique with an unflinching eye toward the absurdities, failures, and longings of contemporary life.
Born in Chicago in 1952 and raised in Georgia, Belville’s formative experiences in the South continue to shape his practice. He earned his M.F.A. from Ohio University in 1977 and quickly distinguished himself through early solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Delaware Art Museum. These early milestones signaled a career that would bridge institutional recognition with deeply personal visual investigations.
From the outset, Belville was less concerned with trends than with timeless questions—about human nature, memory, loss, and the possibility of redemption through art. His paintings draw from the visual vocabulary of the American South, but with layers of contradiction and irony that place them outside of any singular regional reading. Discarded toys, weathered interiors, blindfolded figures, and biblical references cohabit in pictorial spaces where meaning is at once constructed and dismantled.
For more than 35 years, Belville also shaped the artistic minds of others. As a professor at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, he trained generations of painters in the craft of observational painting and the subtleties of visual storytelling. He was honored with UGA’s Lothar Tresp Outstanding Honors Professor Award and was a long-time faculty member of the university’s Cortona program in Italy—an experience that left an indelible mark on his sense of space, surface, and symbolism. The influence of Italian Renaissance painting echoes throughout his work, particularly in the format of his narrative tableaux and his reverence for figuration as a conduit for meaning.
Scott Belville, Reunited, 2019, Oil on panel, 27 × 24 in, 68.6 × 61 cm.
Belville is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting, a Ford Foundation Grant, and a Georgia Council for the Arts Grant. His works are held in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), and have been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Sandler Hudson Gallery, Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now Atlanta Contemporary), and beyond.
Yet it is in his recent work where Belville’s mature voice speaks most clearly. Since retiring from academia in 2014, he has embraced an even more layered, self-reflexive approach to painting—incorporating trompe-l’œil elements, studio mise en scène, and paintings-within-paintings that explore the nature of image construction itself. Fragments of art history—Botticelli, Leonardo, Millais—coexist with pop culture detritus: Mad Magazine characters, television preachers, and campaign-era Donald Trump. In these works, nothing is fixed. Beauty is questioned. Irony shares the canvas with sincerity. And every surface holds the trace of an artist negotiating with meaning.
Scott Belville, From Pillar to Post, (left) and Requiem(right)
Belville’s relationship with Matney Gallery reflects the arc of this mature period. His work was first presented in 2013 as part of Temporal Distortions: Artists Working in the Contemporary South, a curatorial experiment that transformed the City of Williamsburg’s administrative building into an immersive art installation. In 2021, Belville returned to Matney Gallery for The Task That Is the Toil, a large-scale group exhibition responding to themes of survival, uncertainty, and transformation in the wake of global crisis. The show marked a pivotal moment in Belville’s career—a re-engagement with gallery audiences after a period of introspection and studio evolution.
He has since been a featured voice in Three Excellences of Culture: The Work of Art Rosenbaum & Friends (2022), Evocation (2022), A Glimpse into the Future of the Matney Gallery, and The Task That Is the Toil – Revisited (2025). These exhibitions have framed Belville’s work not only in conversation with his contemporaries—including the late Art Rosenbaum—but also in dynamic juxtaposition with a rising generation of Southern artists. His presence in these shows helps anchor Matney Gallery’s commitment to dialogue between tradition and innovation, introspection and public meaning.
Scott Belville ,The Great Divide, 2019 Oil on panel ,32 × 26 in , 81.3 × 66 cm
Stylistically, Belville’s recent canvases feel both deeply autobiographical and culturally panoramic. Many include depictions of an easel, a taped drawing, or a studio floor littered with images—a visual metaphor for the fragmented attention and cultural overload of our time. His compositions present what one critic called “a crowded cataclysm of choices,” yet they are executed with clarity and care. The result is an experience that feels intellectually demanding, emotionally charged, and visually magnetic.
For collectors, curators, and scholars, Belville represents a rare kind of artist: rooted in tradition, but unafraid to disturb it; a technical master with a subversive streak; a regional figure whose concerns are wholly global. His paintings continue to evolve, but their underlying ethos remains consistent: art as a space for meaning-making, for struggle, for wondering aloud.
Matney Gallery is honored to present and champion the work of Scott Belville—a painter whose vision refuses easy resolution, and whose art asks us not just to look, but to truly see.