Scott Prior is a Contemporary Realist painter who lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he has been a resident since 1971. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, he received a BFA in printmaking from the University of Massachusetts in 1971. He has artwork in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum, the Danforth Museum, the Rose Art Museum and other major public and private collections. He has shown extensively in one-person and group shows in the United States and abroad; in 2001 he had a mid-career retrospective at the DeCordova Museum.“It wasn’t until I saw a lot of Edward Hopper’s paintings in one place that I recognized the significance and emotional power of light. That was thirty years ago, and I am still fascinated by the varied and countless effects of light on the tangible world of my experience. In the same year as my discovery of light I changed from being an ironic observer into an emotional participant.” – Scott Prior“The light in his paintings has an expressive quality that is rarely seen in photorealistic works. … (Prior) goes beyond mere hyperrealist bravura and concentrates instead on crafting visual poetry. His enamel smooth surface of his oil on panels erases the hand of the artist and focuses instead on the artist’s eye. The many visual delights, especially his quasi-surreal luminosity of the paintings are more than enough to make great paintings but he goes even further; to what Scott Prior has put it, “discovering the spiritual in the everyday” that gives the artist his power to speak to us of common experience.”– Larry Groff, paintingperceptions.com“Scott Prior is a realist painter of prodigious talent and con- summate skill. But what raises his work beyond the beauty of its presentation is this most romantic vision, a belief that love and laughter lie just beneath the surface of the mundane. He is a conjurer, stirring magic from the ordinary.” – Richard Morange, Scott Prior: New Paintings