Art & Creativity Quote by William Scott

Scott is describing art-making as a chain reaction, not a series of isolated “works.” The line rejects the romantic myth of inspiration striking from nowhere; instead, it frames creativity as an ongoing argument with your own past. Each canvas becomes both evidence and rebuttal. That’s why the sentence pivots on “or”: continuation and resistance are equally legitimate forms of progress. He’s not promising novelty; he’s promising momentum.

The subtext is quietly combative. “Reaction against it” hints at the artist’s private war with habit - with the seductive comfort of a style that starts to congeal into a brand. Scott suggests that repetition isn’t just laziness; it can be a necessary baseline you push off from. The studio becomes less a sanctuary than a feedback loop: you make something, you learn what it trapped you into, you answer it with the next thing.

Context matters because Scott’s work sits in that postwar, modernist pressure cooker where abstraction and representation weren’t just aesthetics, they were allegiances. To say each painting relates to the last is also to admit that taste, ideology, and technique evolve in real time, under scrutiny. This is how a practice stays alive: by treating every finished piece as unfinished business. The intent isn’t to demystify painting, exactly; it’s to locate the mystery where it actually lives - in persistence, revision, and the nerve to disagree with yourself.