Biography

An early start in art and oil painting in North Carolina

North Carolina Artist Scott Plaster grew up in Denton, NC and was exposed to art at an early age. He still remembers how his father would draw Picaso-esque figures for his son to paint with basic student tempura paints on manilla drawing paper. When some kids were awaiting video games and toys from Santa Claus for Christmas, Plaster was eager to get paint, canvas, and pastels. Plaster was oil painting by the age of ten and found his inspiration in the works of Van Gogh, the French Impressionists, other early modern artists, and North Carolina artists like Bob Timberlake and Andrew Wyeth. As a self-taught artist, Plaster began subscribing to The Artists' Magazine as a teenager and immersed himself in art history and technique books of a broad variety. Plaster maintained these interests into his young adulthood, but he did not initially pursue a career in art.

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Education and professional work in North Carolina and beyond

Plaster received a Master's Degree in English from Appalachian State University in 1995, photographing and painting the scenes around Boone during his six-year stay there. He enjoyed a career at IBM in Raleigh North Carolina as an education specialist, where he led the education function for the worldwide IBM retail division. As the team leader and strategist, Plaster led his team into the technology age as it created IBM retail's first technology-based training courses on CD-ROM and the internet. Plaster maintained his technical skills in the field of technology and has worked in the areas of sales, advertising, and custom website development.

During these days, Plaster was inspired by the artwork, landscapes, and sites he saw in his travels to Oxford, Edinburgh, Madrid, Niagara Falls, Denver, San Francisco, the beaches of Florida and North Carolina, and the mountains of North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, and northeast Tennessee. His photographs of these scenes are sometimes still used as subjects for his paintings. Plaster first exhibited his works as an adult in an art gallery in Johnson City, TN.

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Plaster found a productive place to create some of his more recent art work when he moved to Bristol, TN. While continuing his day job in advertising and website consulting, he bought and restored one of the town's oldest historic homes, a 21-room late Victorian brick building that had served as Bristol's first modern hospital. Plaster found an outlet for his love of antiques and memorabilia by furnishing the entire structure as a part-time bed and breakfast for Bristol race visitors. He found the ideal spot for his art studio high atop the 3rd floor in an alcoved room which overlooked downtown Bristol and the Holston mountains from the highest vantage point in town. But Plaster's two main callings in life, art and teaching, had gone largely unfulfilled.

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North Carolina artist comes home

It was in 2005 that Plaster moved back to North Carolina and his life has not been the same since. He has been a high school English teacher for more than 20 years and finds ways to incorporate his love of art and music with the literature and writing he teaches. Plaster's long hours as a teacher still leave him weekends (and summers) to work on his art; over the last few years, he has been more prolific in his art than ever, creating a number of macro-landscapes and his latest series of "whimsical" animals. He is one of several North Carolina artists who paint animals, but his differ from North Carolina wildlife artists in a few key ways. His whimsical animals usually fill the complete "frame" and they offer a unique blend of the realistic and the surreal. 

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His love of the vintage and antique aesthetic was nourished when he lived in a late Victorian 1900 home in Lexington, NC, and more he recently remodeled a 1950 mid-century home near downtown Winston-Salem (think mid-century modern meets electic). He also enjoys listening to music on vinyl, attending concerts and live music, singing, playing guitar, gardening, creating diverse regional and ethnic cuisine, fishing, reading, going to the local Carolina Thunderbirds hockey games, watching the Dodgers and WNBA basketball, and writing poetry. Of all his interests, the main constant for over 30 years, however, has been enjoying and creating art.