I am writing this on the plane to Madrid, pen cramped against the tray table, noise-canceling headphones blocking the engine noise. This month has surprised me. Things have happened so quickly I do not have time to fully digest one experience before another emerges. I’m trying to keep up. Not complaining.
I had barely unpacked my bag from Ragdale when I received an invitation to an opportunity I was completely unaware of: Spain, for a short residency at Tablas de Daimiel National Park. It is part of the Arte y Naturaleza program, with backing from the national parks agency and the government of Castilla-La Mancha. I’ll be painting in the wetlands there alongside three masterful painters from Canada, Spain, and Russia. Now hours from landing, my mind is racing ahead of my body.
I have never been there. Tablas de Daimiel is still just a place on a map. La Mancha is a place of fiction. Don Quixote is already in my thoughts. I will put my feet on the ground and paint what has been a far-off place in my mind.
Don Quixote entered my life through book and stage. A small community performance at the Village Theater in Issaquah, Washington, where I lived for all the early years of my life. I related to him. There were years when I even described myself as Don Quixote to friends, half joking, while my identity shifted solidly into artist. I don’t think I’m mad. I was naming something I recognized in myself: someone leaving a sensible lane and not returning.
Before I land and sink into a new place with artists and organizers, I want these sentences logged while anticipation still feels sharp. Not knowing what comes next is useful. I have to relearn that more than I like to admit.
Quixote had to work for his fantasy. Now technology, in its sycophant habits, will tell you a smoother story than the world actually gives. Structural Omission is how I answer that in paint.
This essay is a prelude on purpose. The residency is brief. Once I am on the ground at Tablas de Daimiel, I will write the second essay from there: light, sound, studio friction, paint that misbehaves, facts that only arrive once you stop predicting and focus on living.
For now I am still breathing canned cabin air, engine drone faint beyond my headphones, halfway between what I left and what I have not yet touched.
Deborah Scott is a contemporary painter and originator of Structural Omission, a theory of representation developed in practice. Her work repositions realism within contemporary art, exposing the incompleteness of perception and dismantling the illusion of narrative closure. Exhibited in museums across the U.S. and Europe, her paintings investigate the limits of observation to examine what can be seen and what remains beyond reach.
Her writing connects Structural Omission to contemporary realism, art theory, post-certainty philosophy, and the problem of human-made representation in the age of AI. Her essays circulate across academic and public platforms, and she has been profiled by art historian John Seed.
Explore the Structural Omission framework →
Learn more about painting in the Post-Certainty Era →
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