SELF-PORTRAITS
AND OLD MASTERS
by Donald Kuspit


F. Scott Hess appears in many of his paintings -- perhaps most provocatively in The Painter and His Daughter (2003) and Riverbed (2004) -- suggesting that they are all self-portraits in principle. In Time, Mind and Fate (all 2005), the mature, hard-eyed Hess appears in softer surrogate form, without his Mephistophelean goatee and moustache, as though he were a callow youth just starting his career as a painter (the clean-shaven painter pictured is, in fact, Hess’ student) and thus innocent as to the ways of the art world rather than a seasoned veteran of its wars, holding his own in it.

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