Scout Zabinski always says she’s an open book, and I believe I got lucky to catch her somewhere in the middle in terms of her career, so we could talk about the past, present and the future.
Misia: Since, I’ve started doing my research about you, I have been thinking of the journey you have been through. From your early beginnings, you treated those nude self-portraits that you make as a form of auto-therapy. Yet, then you’ve separated yourself from that version, even referring to them as ‘she’ rather than ‘I’. I’m curious — how do you reflect on that transformation today, both in terms of your past and your future? If you think about it now, was that persona always a part of you, or did it become something else entirely? And how does that journey relate to your beginnings, especially as a self-taught artist — what did it really feel like to start?
Scout: I’ll tell you how it started and then move on from there how it’s changed. I always say when I’ve started making the actual nude self-portraits, but even before that, I’ve been making art since I was a kid, very drawn to making things, honestly, painting mostly. I think that comes from the trips I would take with my dad, we would go and see museums in Europe, and that left a really big impression on me. Some kids are really dazzled by movies or by whatever. And, to me, paintings were magical. I have this vivid memory of seeing Bernini’s Primavera as a kid and just being like, how did someone make that? I just wanted to understand the process, wanting to understand how they thought of that. I was probably seven years old and I was just so… it just blew my mind. I remember we went to the Sistine Chapel and not necessarily, I’d seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel even that young, but the thing that actually blew me away was, have you been to the Sistine Chapel?
Misia: Of course.
Scout: Okay. Do you know that there’s a hallway when you go through the tour of the Vatican, there’s this, it doesn’t really matter if you know it or not, there’s this massive hallway that it takes you around 10 minutes to walk down it and it’s all painted. It’s one of those things that I feel like people, when I was there, were just walking through, but it was meticulously painted with all these miniature paintings and it just baffled me.
I was the kid who would stay after school and paint. In high school I was a nerd. Art was always a hobby for me because no one in my family was neither a creative nor an artist. So, I just didn’t think it was a job that you could do. In high school I got really sick. It was also then the outlet for my eating disorder. It was the first time I made self-portraits. I made a few then. I don’t really talk about those often because they don’t feel like, I guess this is kind of the story of my art, I just didn’t take it seriously for a long time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t making it before. But, it was just a hobby. And you know, my high school gave me an award for it. I was just like – cool. Then I got to college.
I didn’t go to school for art. Because again, I was just like, who does that? Every semester I would take an elective that was a painting elective. Eventually, my professor who is a famous artist and he actually is a professor now at Yale. He was always really hard on me. At the time, I was like, can you just cut me a break? I’m trying to just make some art here. Now looking back, I’m like, oh, he saw that I was actually talented and had something and knew that I wasn’t taking it seriously. When I started making the actual self portraits, I had come to LA for the first time and I was just visiting a friend and I met someone who I’m still friends with, who is a painter. I saw his studio and the fact that he did it for a living. It was the first time I really saw that you could do it. How that works, like you had a studio, you worked on shows. I didn’t understand any of that. When I went back to New York, I was like, okay, I need to take this seriously. I made this self portrait, which was one of the early ones with the bag over my head. That was honestly, because I wasn’t confident enough in my painting skills to paint a face, let alone my face. I painted faces before, but there’s an extra stress of painting your own face. Because, you know it so well that you know when anything’s off, even if someone else says it does look like you, you know, it can be the smallest thing. I tried to paint my face. I hated it. I put a bag over it and was like, this is changing now. For the first couple of years, even once I got my first show and actually before I got my first show, I had spent a good year and a half on a group of these paintings. It was during my last year of college, which entered into the pandemic. I was just holed up in a studio by myself. I had a studio that was probably…, it was a hundred square feet. It was insane. It was so small. I would go and I would work on one painting at a time every single day during the pandemic. I didn’t know where these were going. I just wanted to take this seriously and make paintings that I’m proud of. I felt I had to prove something. I had to prove that I could make a large scale, figurative painting, that I could make stuff as the people I looked up to. I kept seeing all the differences between like, you know, my painting wasn’t as good in this way or that way. It was very comparative.
This process that was starting with being very therapeutic in terms of processing a lot of my history with eating disorders and abuse, really turned into this, even more damaging thing. It just made me feel that I wasn’t a good painter. I think eventually I got better and I didn’t feel I proved myself to myself and to others in terms of being able to make a really big, good painting. Then I was like, do I want to be making these? Is this what I actually want to be doing? It became my niche because people knew that I painted myself. It’s this weird thing where most painters can go to a show and people don’t know what they look like. I would show up and people would know what I look like because I paint myself, which was really uncomfortable.
I guess when it shifted, I noticed that when I got into painting, I remember saying this to another artist and then they looked at me as if I was stupid. I was like, I want to be the type of artist that doesn’t have a brand. They were like, well, every artist kind of has something they’re known for. When I got done with my show in Stockholm, I was so drained. That entire year I had been working on that show, I was dreading it. I wasn’t enjoying going to the studio and I reckon it was because each painting was like a mountain. I was making a mountain for myself that I didn’t really want to climb. It wasn’t, but it felt like it had a purpose, and they did. I love the paintings that I made, but they weren’t fun paintings to make. Art just for me at the time was not supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be challenging, and it was supposed to be as moving as those paintings that I saw as a kid. It was supposed to be magical.
I equated hard work with that. I call it the junior album syndrome, because I think every type of artist gets to this point where you have a first album that people love, and it puts you on the map. Then you have a second album that people are like, is it going to be as good? And then your third album, usually if you do it well, it cements your place. But after that, it’s like, are you going to keep doing the same thing or are you going to switch up? So, when I went to Stockholm, I was just thinking about… if I was going to continue painting, what would that feel like. I had made this sculpture, which I assume you saw this sardine. When I made that, it was the first time I had just had fun with art for so long. It didn’t feel heavy because my art had stopped feeling heavy a bit before in terms of the memories and what I was making them about, which was just because I had worked through so much. I said this to someone else the other day, but I think it brings to what you asked. Art can really help us through issues just as much as a therapist could help us through certain periods of our lives, or friends. Then you move on from a friendship or you move on from a therapist or you simply outgrow things. And, my art didn’t have to fix the part of me I asked it to fix anymore.
Misia: You’ve talked about the collective side of your work, and I remember reading that you used to care a lot about what people thought, but then you kind of found a way to detach yourself from that. Do you ever think about what happens to your work once it’s out in the world? Not in terms of whether people like it or not, but more about how it takes on a life of its own – like it’s yours, but at the same time not yours anymore. It becomes something that others interpret, experience, and even reshape in their own way. Do you ever reflect on that – on how your art can be so personal, yet once released, it’s part of something bigger, beyond your control?
Scout: I think it is both. I think that I didn’t fully realize what I was offering. I tell my family because my family still tells me all the time. They’re like, maybe you should get a real job. And I’m like, I have a job. I’m an artist. This happens, despite the fact that I worked hard, I worked my ass off for years. I tell people all the time, it is a lot of hard work and being charismatic, being a go-getter and believing in yourself and all those things to be an artist. But, I’m also blessed. I know that the reason I have any of this is not just because of me. I feel very grateful for that. I say that because I think that it’s almost a perfect storm. That my art filled a niche at a very important time where that niche needed to be filled. When I was a 20, 21-year-old artist who didn’t go to art school, and didn’t know what this job would entail, I think I offered everything because I didn’t know what it would take. If I could go back, would I do it again? Probably. But knowing what I know now, I would do a lot of things differently. One of my best friends is getting her MFA right now. She asked me if I thought my brand was made by me or by my galleries. It was a really interesting question, I told her both. I made my brand, but also the people who chose me bought into it. They were trying to also co-build that, which means that they had knowledge of also what I was doing. I mean, the gallerist I worked with for the past couple of years said to me when he met me – People may not understand your work for a while, and that’s fine. I’ve always kind of felt that way.
I’ve always kind of felt like the people who get it, get it. And the people who don’t get it, will get it later because sometimes I don’t get it at the time. Sometimes I need someone else to see it, to be reflected back at me so that I understand it more. You don’t have all of the pieces and all the threads being tied together. I think it was a lot of my doing. But also, yeah, I think it was the right place at the right time.
Misia: Do you ever have people – maybe even a gallery – come up to you and say something that, on one hand, shows they don’t fully get it yet, but at the same time, sparks a shift in how you see it?
Scout: All the time. Yeah. All the time. When I was starting out, I got a lot of hate messages on Instagram. It’s ridiculous because I don’t even have that many followers. Instagram tried to delete me a few times. It used to really upset me because obviously everything I make is personal. It’s me. I was scared before that they were right. That I was not a good painter, that I was selfish, that I was making egotistical paintings, which is what a lot of people said. And, you know what, maybe they were right. I was young and had stuff I needed to figure out, and I was painting myself. Isn’t that all of our stories? Isn’t that what we all are trying to do in our early twenties? That was my vessel. The question that I didn’t really get to that you asked though, which kind of relates to, is why I decided to do it with my naked body and give all of that. I don’t really know. I’ve always been an open book and I think it really goes to what art is to me, not necessarily just painting, it’s more about the connection. My vessel for connecting with other people is through my paintings. I believe that my real talent isn’t in making paintings, it’s feeling. For better or for worse, I feel things really deeply. I think every artist, like a musician, an actor, whatever, we feel very intensely. It is processed through our brains and it comes out in whatever our preferred art vessel is. I always say that to me, it is the biggest act of sacrifice so that other people can somehow feel a fraction of it.
Misia: I noticed in some interviews that you’ve mentioned having a work plan. At one point, it was around 40 pieces, then it grew to about 200. I also heard that you’ve started exploring sculpture and photography as part of your practice. Do you ever think that this trajectory might change entirely, like that some of those plans might not hold up as you keep evolving? I mean, it’s fascinating because your self-portraits, for example, have already transformed significantly – from the early ones with your head masked. Do you ever worry that, by the time you reach those goals, they might no longer resonate with where you are as an artist? Or is this ongoing transformation just part of the process for you?
Scout: It’s funny that you asked because there’s a whole list of like, 200 painting ideas that I kind of just have put to the side as I don’t want to make them right now. To me, it’s not that I will never make them. It’s that it’s not what’s calling to me right now. The thing I have to do is stay true to myself. I think art changes as an artist’s goals change. As I grow as a person, my goals will continue to change. Right now, I want to feel the world, myself and my life, because all of our lives are symbolic of the time. The world needs some happiness and some joy. I deserve to have some joy, and some playfulness and escape, we all need that. That’s why this new body of work feels very important, because it is like a laugh. In my new artist statement, I said it was kind of what I needed right now. This new body of work with a sculpture and with an installation is about community. It’s about participation, which I also think we need, we need to bridge the community.
Maybe, I’ll come back to those paintings, maybe I’ll come back to the ones that have backgrounds and that have bags on, all of those paintings are still a part of me. Even if I look back at the other ones, it’s funny, there was a gallerist asking me to recreate some paintings, because he wanted to do a show with me. He liked these older paintings more. I couldn’t do that right now. It’s not what I want to make right now. That would be me lying. If my voice is my art, then if I’m speaking through what someone else wants me to say, then it’s not my voice anymore. That’s different for every artist. But, the core of my art practice is my authenticity. That’s because I want to be, or I think it’s not even that I want to be, but I think now I understand my art as the hyper-personal being reflective of the experience. This is why I’ve been able to detach from them because I’ve had enough understanding through experiences with people when they experienced my work to understand that it’s not about me. No one’s looking at my paintings and trying to really understand me. They’re looking at it as a mirror. They see what they want to take away. If that’s a judgmental, harsh hate message on Instagram, then that’s probably how they talk to themselves. So, it doesn’t bother me anymore just because I understand my function. My biggest hope for wherever it goes is that I can continue to connect with people through it. And if at all help someone see a bit of themselves, then it’s worth it.
Misia: I don’t really like to do it with interviews, but I’m gonna switch a little bit. You have a new exhibition coming up in New York, would you like to talk about it a bit?
Scout: It’s a group show in New York opening next Wednesday. It’s with the gallery I’ve never worked before called Room57. I have three paintings and a sculpture/installation in it. It’s nice because this is kind of the first year since my career started that I’ve had the time to just participate in smaller shows. I usually work on one show a year. I work to make this massive solo show that has all these massive paintings, and it’s perfect. This year feels like a play. I’m even changing the body of work to just do these testers. The paintings in this one are basically the way the new body of work is set up. Everything is kind of a still life. There’s me with a human sized object, and a figure… I could talk about it forever because I’m really excited about it, but I think for me, the most important part is that it’s really touching, like, what is it to even be alive? What does that mean? I think we take it for granted all the time of just, what is it to have a soul? What do we assign that quality to? How do we not lose the value of that in our daily life, in our repetitive patterns in our actual, you know, just like getting in the car and driving somewhere, how do we remember how special it is to be a unique human being? I think the antithesis of that is the way that we assign human-like qualities to objects, the way that we deify, lifestyles, that we make these other things godlike. If we’re making things godlike, then what does that say about how we view other people or how we view ourselves? It’s a lot about identity and about… life and death.
Anyway, so each piece, or I guess it’s really about groupings of pieces, is centred around a specific object. The object in this group show is a lipstick, which I know a lot of female artists have played with, and it’s a massive icon in the feminist movement, which I think is really important because this is also the first time where I’ve kind of played into [having a brand] it for the most part. I’ve had collectors say to me in the past, I want the nude girl in the painting. And I’m like, oh, you want me naked in the painting? Great. Yeah, sure. I can do that…
This is the first time, where I’m being a bit sarcastic with the paintings. There’s humour in them, but I know very much what I’m doing and turning that joke back on the viewer. If I’m an object and you are saying that I am a figure in the painting, then what is the object? And then what are you? It’s really playing into the circle of the gaze that’s been intertwined with my work but just taking it up a notch. It’s this lipstick and there will be a lipstick sculpture in the show, which is set up almost as an installation in the show. Basically, I want people to come to the show and pose in the installation. That is also like you asked about where the work may go. I want photography to be a part of my work because photography has always been the starting point. I started with a nude photo shoot and that’s how I started making these paintings. Every painting starts from a photograph. So eventually, I want to have my photography be shown alongside the paintings, but it’s also doing that in a way where people understand there’s a reason that this is being shown because it’s a part of the work. By also asking people to pose with the lipstick, with this culture and therefore inside the painting, it’s introducing it to the collective experience. This can also be you. You can stand in for my body and it’d be just as meaningful or just the fact that it’s not really about me. I’m really excited for people to, even if in the silliest way, have a photograph of them in this painting, but also just to see what it feels like. I was doing a shoot with the sculpture the other day. Now every time I make one of these sculptures, I have a friend who’s my photographer and we do a photo shoot to essentially recreate the painting once the sculpture is finished. I got naked, I posed with the sculpture and we couldn’t stop laughing. The painting is me sitting on the lipstick cap and I can’t explain to someone how it feels to be sitting butt naked on top of a human sized lipstick cap. It feels insane. It feels absolute insanity. It’s terrifying for me too. Even for someone who is very used to being naked and to being vulnerable and raw, I do these shoots and I’m uncomfortable. It’s a new feeling for me every time.
Misia: Would you say that, through all these transformations and your focus on building a sense of collectiveness, you’ve found a clearer purpose in the art world? Or do you feel that defining a purpose like that isn’t necessary to think about?
Scout: That’s a rabbit hole to go down. That it’s not really up to me, it’s not my choice. That goes back to what I talked earlier about, I didn’t ask for any of this. It’s a blessing, but it’s not what I planned for myself. I didn’t think I’d be almost 28 years old and be making nude paintings of myself for a living. That’s insane. My child self would be like, what are you doing? I don’t think it’s really about a purpose, I know what my purpose is in relation to my art in terms of fulfilling myself. I know that now, I can’t just fulfil that through my paintings. That was something if I could go back and tell myself maybe where you’re at now, some advice, it’d be like, don’t put so much pressure on the work. I was really scared for a really long time that, you know, there’s the famous 27 club of artists that have died when they were 27. I didn’t understand it until I got everything I ever wanted. I had the shows I had dreamt about. I was suddenly friends with people I had looked up to for years in college. I was going on fancy trips to Europe and I was living a life I didn’t know existed. And, I was so fucking unhappy. I felt so empty, and depressed. It just really hurt. I didn’t understand why. I had put so much pressure on getting what I wanted from my art to be the thing that I needed. I didn’t understand that it had a life of its own and it was going to give me what I needed. If I only poured in energy to my studio practice, I could only take so much out of it. The past two years my schedule has changed. I don’t go to the studio every day. I go when I should and when I want to, but everything else nurtures my art, my time at home, my time doing nothing, my time with friends, it’s all a part of my art practice. Doing nothing is a huge part of being an artist. It’s the time in between, it’s when we feel it’s when we have space to comprehend. I think that for me, as I’ve grown up a little bit, I just have realized that my purpose is different than my art’s purpose. I get to choose what my purpose is, but I don’t have much say over what my art’s purpose is.
Misia: When Lisa [Boudet] told me about you, I thought it was more like a random opportunity, but I think that I’ve learned a lot from you, and it feels it wasn’t that random after all.
Scout: It usually isn’t.
Misia: I remember listening to an interview where you talked about all these artists you admire, the ones who spent years perfecting their paintings, and you said you can’t really do that. I think you also touched on this idea of disappearing – I’m not sure if you fully meant it that way, but it stuck with me. Do you ever think you could actually disappear, though? I mean, it feels like you’ve lived through so much in terms of transformation and experience. It’s like I’m talking to someone who’s been through several versions of themselves, and yet you’re not even 30!
Scout: People say that often. They’re like, how old are you? I have lived quite a few lifetimes. I don’t think this is the first time my soul has tried to get through life. It’s funny you say that, because everyone has a soul, not your person but your soul has a mission. You have to go through many lifetimes to figure it out. That’s why sometimes you meet people and you’re like, I know you from a past life! Maybe in your past life, something didn’t work out, and now you’re going to figure it out in this life. It’s funny, because I feel my soul is finally understanding a lot of things. It’s not me, but my soul is getting things. About disappearing, I disappear every day. The beauty in me detaching from my work now is that I am okay with being an idea of a person, which I used to really hate, especially with Instagram. I used to really hate the fact that people would assume a lot about me. Because, I thought that meant they knew me. If I was trying to sell my actual soul and existence through a screen, if I could sum that up for you, I’d be a very small human being. I play into a lot of the imagery of my work of being. It is a bit of a performance. It’s being an artist, it’s showing up and being engaging. Is this me all the time? No. People are always shocked when I say I’m an introvert. They’re like, wait, what, you’re so social, and you’re so talkative. I am like that because I spend so much time disappearing. I spend a lot of time just doing things that have nothing to do with art on a daily basis. It allows me to show up and give a lot of this when I need to. But, do I think that one day, I’ll take an actual break from art? Perhaps if I can, and if I’m financially in a place where I can take some time to experiment and just play, I would love that. I think that again, to me, the time outside of creating is also a part of creating. I do want to go on trips and see parts of the world that I haven’t seen before, because that will inform my art in a really beautiful way, even if I don’t bring a notebook with me. The other thing which I’ve been trying to nurture more of is that I consider myself a writer too. I finally finished a poetry book that I’ve been working on for the past four years. I want that to be a part of the work eventually. There’s only so much time in a day, but eventually, I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t think the projects will stop, but kind of what you said before, they may take many, many different forms.
We chatted with Scout a bit longer after that. I felt that for an emerging artist like myself this conversation has switched a lot of my personal approach. Hopefully, you could have gained a better glimpse not only on Scout’s art but most importantly, her as a person. The group exhibition titled Fantasyland that takes place in New York City at the Room57 Gallery opened last Wednesday (7.06.25), so better take yourself, your friends and family and sit on that lipstick!
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