“An authentic art survives stylistic evolutions over time to become a benchmark of art history. In this regard, I believe historians will judge Scott Parsons’ work as being authentic, original, and (most importantly) a contribution to the historical trajectory of stained glass in architecture.” 
~ Kenneth von Roenn

I am a painter who works in glass.

That’s the simplest way I know to say it, and it matters — because my training didn’t begin with traditional stained glass. I came to glass through studio painting, through drawing, through the belief that mark-making carries meaning. But if I am honest, it began earlier than that. From kindergarten through undergraduate I attended religious schools, and from kindergarten through eighth grade I sat through a chapel service every day. Thank goodness there was a single work of stained glass rising from floor to ceiling that I could lose myself in. I didn’t recognize it then, but my real training in glass had already begun.

My teachers who shaped me were shaped by some of the most consequential artists of the twentieth century. In high school I would study at night at the Colorado Institute of Art with Jim Valone, a student of Hans Hofmann, for whom the canvas was a field of energy — color and gesture in dynamic relationship. At Augustana I studied with Carl Grupp, a student of Rudy Pozzatti, who studied with Ben Shahn at CU Boulder, my alma mater, where I received my MFA in painting. Ben Shahn assisted Diego Rivera on his famous mural at Rockefeller Center. Ben Shahn was an artist of conscience who once said that the public function of art is always to create community. Another of Carl’s teachers, William Bailey, studied with Herbert Fink and Joseph Albers. Herbert Fink studied with George Grosz.

I believe what Ben Shahn suggests about public art. It’s why large-scale work in permanent materials — glass, terrazzo, mosaic — feels like the natural home for what I’m trying to do. These are not gallery objects. They live in places where people gather, grieve, celebrate, pray, pass through on their way somewhere else. They function like cairns for the journey — markers that say this place matters, that something significant happened or could happen here, that you are not lost. And they change the sensory and spiritual atmosphere of a space in ways that are hard to name but immediately felt — something in the quality of the light, the color, the air itself.

My attraction to Chinese calligraphy comes from this same place: the idea of a single, gestural mark, made with full attention, can convey energy and meaning. My love for watercolor comes from the way it can convey the light of the paper, how the nuance of layered washes yields lush and absorbing color. Both of these approaches to art suggest a kind of freshness and simplicity — that it becomes both metaphorical and referential at once, capable of making relationships between things that resist explanation. What looks like a painterly sensibility in my glass work is a way of thinking about light and surface — about pulling the light out from inside the material, opening it up. The layering, the splattering, the painting, the firing — each decision of the hand accumulates into something that crosses a threshold I can’t fully explain, where the material becomes luminous and has an embodied presence. The vision begins in painting — in gesture, in the quality of a mark, in color understood in terms of light and presence rather than pigment.

I don’t experience this as problem-solving. It is an affirmation — of beauty, of community, of the spiritual and poetic dimensions of human experience. That interior life is what I am always reaching for, and waiting for. Sacred work requires that patience.

I am inspired by the idea of place: of defining a space with a sensitivity that can transform, celebrate, and engage the redemptive qualities of metaphor for the profoundly personal and communal in people’s lives. A church, a hospital, an airport terminal — each one is a field of human experience that deserves that kind of attention.

I teach painting and drawing at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I also live with my family. I serve on the board of the Association of Consultants for Liturgical Space. My work has been published in more than a hundred publications, including Architectural Record, Art in America, Sculpture, and Stained Glass Quarterly, and has received awards from CODAworx, Faith & Form, and the National Terrazzo and Mosaic Association, among others.

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