“Post-certainty” doesn’t mean we’ve given up on truth. It means we’ve stopped pretending that truth arrives as a complete picture. In a post-certainty world, we recognize that knowledge is often partial, mediated, or constructed. We find ourselves no longer believing in singular authority, whether it comes from institutions, algorithms, or even our own perception. This […]
Title: Post-Certainty: Painting in the Age of AI by Deborah Scott Author’s Note: This essay introduces a central argument behind both my painting practice and this Substack: The Full Story Doesn’t Exist. It lays the conceptual groundwork for future publication and expands the thesis I’ve developed over years of work: in a post-certainty world, structural
Before it was a painting, before it was a theory, structural omission began with a chart. Not a composition sketch. A two-by-two matrix used in psychology and communication theory. I first encountered the Johari Window while working outside the art world. It was designed to map interpersonal awareness: what we know about ourselves, what others know, and, most compelling
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What I Mean by Structural Omission by Deborah Scott I originated Structural Omission to name a framework in realist painting where incompleteness is constitutive, not elective. It is not about what is “intentionally left out by design,” but about what can never be fully rendered in representation. It is a conceptual foundation: the recognition that
Beyond the Gap: Structural Omission vs. Deliberate Omission in Art and Writing by Deborah Scott In both visual art and literature, omission has long been used as a tool—what’s withheld can speak as loudly as what’s revealed. But not all omissions mean the same thing. There’s a critical distinction between what I call structural omission and
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I originated Structural Omission to name the central argument behind both my painting practice and this Substack: The Full Story Doesn’t Exist. I have always been comfortable with gray areas and realized years ago that the full story—any story—was never there to begin with. Realism offers certainty. It gives us a world rendered so completely
Welcome—I’m Deborah Scott. I’m a painter whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S. and internationally. I write about what happens when a painting admits it can’t tell the whole story—and why that might be the most honest thing it can do. This publication is called The Full Story Doesn’t Exist, because I
