Hearts of Men - Artist Statement

Hearts of Men
by Richard Thomas Scott

I read somewhere that all art is about sex, God, and death. My story isn’t about sex or God, but it touches on death. It’s about violence, and civil war reenactment, and also about art. More succinctly, my story is about a school shooting and how it changed the course of my life.

I was born in Stone Mountain Ga. It is known for a large piece of granite upon which is carved the high relief of three civil war generals. I spent many a childhood summer night there watching the laser show, a spectacle of which the only part I recall is the song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by Charlie Daniels. The devil challenges a master fiddle player to a faustian bargain. They would have a fiddling contest and if the protagonist wins he gets a fiddle made of gold. If the devil wins, he gets the fiddler’s soul.

May 20th, 1999 was an unusually cool morning in Conyers, GA. It was the last day of my senior year. I walked through the parking lot past several pickup trucks brandishing Confederate flags and empty gun racks in the cab. This didn’t surprise me, it was the landscape of my youth. Like every morning, I and hundreds of other kids congregated in the commons: a large, open space with skylights adjoining the dining hall. My friends and I were talking about whatever it is teenagers talk about. At around 8 AM, I heard a series of loud cracks behind me. At first, I thought they were fireworks, a senior prank, until I saw my friends’ mouths open in shock. At risk of sounding cliche, I have to say that time really did slow down for me. There seemed to be a hush filling the air, punctuated now and again by the squeeks of sneakers, muffled screams, and gunshots.

As I turned, I saw T.J. Solomon, aiming low and firing at the scattering students. I heard the sound of a lunch table being turned on its side behind me. A friend yelled for me to get down. I would like to say that I sprang into action, ushering students to safety like my best friend Eric Harris (a strange coincidence), but what I actually did was just stand there. Perhaps it was shock, perhaps it was fear, but I couldn’t understand what was happening. One month before, we learned about the tragedy of Columbine. This was not something that happens to us. It’s something that happens to someone else, far away. It happens in movies, where the difference between good and evil is clear. The villain is an evil monster and the hero arrives just in time to stop him. I kept expecting Neo from the Matrix to appear, but I guess he was busy diverting some other slow motion tragedy.
 

About twenty feet to my right, I saw a young girl fall to the ground, a rose hip of blood blooming from her leg, and I turned to see the barrel of a gun pointed at me. Looking up, I locked eyes with him. I didn’t see the movie villain I expected. He was just a kid. I saw pain, and fear, and anger, and as angry as I have been at him in the years since, I have to honestly say that I didn’t see evil in his eyes. This is much more frightening because it means that it doesn’t take a monster to do this, many people can become this person. Apart from the obvious question of why he did it, I’ve often wanted to ask him what he remembers of that moment. Why didn’t he shoot me? Why did he lower his gun, turn, and leave?

I have a theory about this. Maybe he saw himself as the hero - a sort of lone cowboy exacting justice on those who had wronged him. When he looked at me, I wasn’t acting appropriately for the situation. I wasn’t running or screaming, but standing there staring into his eyes. Maybe I broke the pattern. Did I imagine it or was something communicated between us? Perhaps he saw a human being like himself. Perhaps there was a transmission of empathy. Perhaps this allowed him to see our common humanity. Perhaps empathy is the key? Maybe if he hadn’t felt so alone. Maybe if someone had shown him empathy sooner, this could have been prevented? Maybe it’s arrogant to think that I had anything to do with it.

That moment taught me more than just the brevity of life. It taught me that tragedies don’t happen in the obvious places and that we are all participants in the culture that makes them possible. It was the moment I knew that I must contribute to culture what talent I have to forge connections between people. I must offer solace to the alienated, hope to the hopeless, catharsis for those in pain. Next time it happens I wouldn’t just stand there. Next time I would do something. Next time what happens? I had no idea what that meant.

I became distracted by the course of life... college, marriage, grad school, moving to New York and Paris to study art, divorce, the struggle to make ends meet as an artist. The struggle to feel like what I was doing in life had purpose. All of those questions grew heavier in the back of my mind, unanswered. Then Sandy Hook happened about an hour from where I lived. A flood of emotions overwhelmed me, but above all, I was furious. Why hadn’t something been done about this? When I looked for answers, I saw the talking heads exploiting it for their political agenda, rather than cooperating to enact practical solutions. I started doing research and learned that the number of mass shootings had increased each year. I searched for someone who would change the course of the conversation in a more productive direction. There were articles and studies, a number of excellent films that addressed the subject such as “Elephant” and “Bowling for Columbine”, but they didn’t seem to break the gridlock in the national conversation. I waited for the hero to come in and save the day, but like before, no one appeared. It struck me that just as we all participate in creating this culture, it takes all of us to change it. And unlike the last time when I froze, I decided to act. I would find a way to address gun violence in my paintings. Maybe I could get to the root of it. Maybe I could make work that inspired people to perceive things differently. But how? A year passed, and I was afraid that I was as paralyzed as before. I was reading and sketching, but I hadn’t painted anything. I feared that I wasn’t up to the task. And even if I was, who would care?

Then one night I had a dream. I was back in the commons area in the midst of the shooting. I heard the crack of a gun and I saw the girl fall to the ground. I turned and saw the gun pointed at me. But then the room faded away and we were in a field at dawn. The students were dressed as civil war soldiers and their silhouettes darted through the fog and smoke.
I woke up in a sweat with the realisation that the roots of what happened to us went much deeper than my story. It was bigger than school shootings, it was even bigger than the polarized politics of our day. It goes back to the very soil of our cultural identities as Americans, divided in so many parts: north and south, urban and rural, white and black. It struck me that many of the soldiers in the Civil War weren’t much more than boys, especially from the south. Some kind of strange symmetry drew me to this metaphor and I knew intuitively that it was the beginning of the road to understanding how we got here. And I knew that my fears were right. I wasn’t up to the task. But that didn’t mean I should do nothing. I couldn’t find the answers alone, but I could ask better questions.

Since childhood, art had always been my way of digesting life, of understanding the world around me. So, it somehow made sense when I began painting Civil War reenactments. I wanted to understand what it was about the romanticism of the gun. I traveled to a battle in Richmond and enlisted as a union soldier. I felt that I had to get as close to the experience as possible and I wanted to understand the motivation behind why people did it. Growing up in Georgia, I had heard many a person proclaim that the “south shall rise again”, while a shotgun hung on a rack in their truck in front of a Confederate battle flag. And I guess that’s what I expected to see. I was wrong.
 
The day of my first reenactment, I was sweating in my wool uniform. I found myself marching in line across an open field in direct eyeline of the Confederate troops who hid in the protection of earthenworks. I was anxious as I had spent the last fifteen years getting as far away from guns as I possibly could and now, here I was marching calming toward over fifty of them as they fired at me across an open field. A concussion of air push me forward as a canon fired behind me and my ears rang. The reenactors were extremely dedicated to their characters, acting out every advance and retreat, every detail, some falling to the ground, clutching their chest in a pantomime of death. I remember thinking how surreal it was, but I had no idea that it would become even more so.

That night, instead of going back to the hotel room I had booked, I decided to camp with the troops. We sang baudy old songs into the night and I lay beside the fire with only a damp wool blanket between me and the hard ground. Around 4 in the morning, I was finally able to sleep, but soon awoke at dawn to the sound of shots in the distance. The camp was completely deserted. I hastily dressed and dashed through the woods toward the sound of battle. Branches and thorns slashed at my face in the dark and when I came to a clearing I saw one of the most astonishing visions of my life. A swath of pink streaked the horizon and the field was hugged with layers of fog and smoke. Soldiers waded through it like phantoms, their silhouettes disappearing and reappearing. Flashes of gun and cannon fire danced across the field like fireflies in the distance and each flash of light described an intimate scene of valour or loss. I saw a drummer boy who reminded me so much of T.J., around the same age, maybe fifteen. Caught by the opposing army, he drew his pistol and fired at them. It was as if he was an echo from nearly a hundred and fifty years before. I asked myself if I was dreaming again, but the scratches from the thorns assured me that I wasn’t. I came here expecting to see the ugliness of human nature - people reliving one of the most gruesome and horrible events of American history. And though what I found was in some ways the glorification of tragedy, it was also the remembrance of it. It was transformative, and somehow, hauntingly beautiful. I don’t pretend that I have experienced real war. And I don’t expect it would feel the same way. But, for the first time I understood that powerful nostalgia of the American mythos and I came closer to understanding a perspective so different from my own.

For the first time I felt like I wasn’t frozen. I wasn’t just a witness or a victim who was lucky enough to be overlooked. I was on the path to understanding. My contribution might be small and maybe no one will even notice. But culture exists in the spaces between us, and if each of us make our own small contribution, we get one step closer to resolution. We won’t be saved by a lone hero, but maybe, if each of us can reach one other person, together we can make a difference.