SCOT RITTENBAUM

Scot Rittenbaum (b. 1955) is a self-taught artist based in the Charleston, South Carolina, area. After decades working in the business and nonprofit sectors while raising his family in Atlanta, Rittenbaum relocated to the Lowcountry in 2019 and committed himself fully to his studio practice. Working across canvas, wood panel, clayboard, and paper, he employs acrylic, oil stick, pastel, pen, and marker in compositions shaped by intuition, movement, memory, and repeated revision.

Rittenbaum’s work develops through a process of layering, erasure, adjustment, and rediscovery, allowing traces of earlier decisions to remain visible within the finished surface. In The Garden Variety Show, his ongoing House Imagined series returns to the familiar architecture of the house as both image and abstraction—an elemental form through which ideas of shelter, belonging, memory, atmosphere, and place can emerge. Balancing expressive mark-making with compositional restraint, the works remain deliberately open-ended, inviting the viewer to locate his or her own associations within them.