Governor Phil Scott isn’t ready to completely give up stock car racing anytime soon, but since becoming Vermont Governor, according to news reports he has taken up a hobby that many who know him would consider unlikely: painting. I suppose he may find the demands of being Governor more taxing than his terms as Vermont’s part-time Lieutenant Governor. So it’s not so surprising that he desires some time to unwind from his full-time demands.

Scott’s new pastime isn’t unheard of in the political world. Notably Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, even George W. Bush are just a few well known political leaders who took to the brush and easel for relaxation and escape.

The interesting thing in Governor Scott’s case is that no one outside the immediate circle has seen his work. So as you can imagine since news of this activity has leaked out speculation among the Montpelier press corps is rife over what style and subject matter he has taken to portraying.

Not much else is known but the emerging conventional wisdom among reporters is Scott works in acrylics and finds inspiration in the Vermont landscapes — our gentle rolling mountains dotted with farms, mills, and maples. Would Scott favor the style of Norman Rockwell, or, say, Grandma Moses?

Another area for speculation around his recently discovered hobby is how much relationship his art may have to his politics. What might be read in Scott’s imagery?  A Scott landscape might show a small town, farm, blacksmith shop, mill building of some kind and likely a town school. Would that be a private prison complex under construction in the distance?

Would his town school be closed and empty? The local students now relocated, bused to classes at a large regional-run educational district? Are there artistic hints that the farm is operating free from certain state regulations the artist painter might consider burdensome? Maybe the streams bordering the village and the distant lake are abloom with “gorgeous” toxic blue green algae caused by uncontrolled agricultural phosphorus runoff. The neat modern industrial mill building nestled in the valley might be closed-up despite thousands of dollars in state sponsored tax incentives and development grants  handed out for job creation and retention over years. Likely the owner, a multi-national corporation, bolted from the Vermont landscape unconcerned that the state might try to claw back the funds or demand an accounting for the grants and incentives.

Another theory taking hold concerning his subject matter is that the Governor is painting NASCAR art. Born out of nostalgia for simpler days, longing for his time as Lt. Governor racing his stock car at Thunder Road, perhaps he’s artistically emulating  Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the legendary 1960’s artist of the hot-rodding world.  

No fooling, it is all idle speculation at this point — and no public art shows are in the offing, speculation not withstanding. Governor Scott when reached by phone (at his studio?) on April 1^st would only say: “Life is much too short to worry about art critics.”