Lorenzo Scott was born on July 23rd in 1934 in West Point, Georgia. When his mother, who worked in the fields supplying cotton to the local mills, lost her job during the Depression, the family moved to Atlanta in search of work.

One of eleven children, Lorenzo tells of a time in his youth when he first saw his mother make a sketch, and knew even at a tender age that he wanted to be able to draw like that. Though Scott attended public school until the tenth grade, he admits to being more interested in drawing than schoolwork."I've been sketching all my life since I was about five," he said, "I got my study lookin' at the museum."

In his youth, Lorenzo’s family lived across the street from a Southern Baptist church where they were active members. Here the young Lorenzo developed the life-long devout Christian faith that underpins both his art and his life. He often tells stories of extraordinary events that have occurred in his life which stem from his strong faith.

As a young man, Scott worked as a house painter and in construction, and didn’t make his first oil painting until the age of twenty-five. It was another twenty years, after he visited New York in 1968 and discovered the paintings of the old masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before he was recognized as a serious artist.

So enamored with the paintings of the Renaissance artists, Scott spent hours by himself studying their techniques and style, pouring over the images he found both in books, and in the museums, then experimenting with oil glazing, composition, and learning how to balance color and contrast. According to Karen Klacsmann, curator for research at the Morris Museum of Art, "The path that Scott chose is similar in many ways to a guild apprenticeship in the medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque eras with one distinct difference -- there was no master artist to guide him during his term of apprenticeship. With a talent for drawing, acute observation, and an iron will, he looked to actual paintings to silently reveal the methods and techniques of artists who had produced spectacular works of art hundreds of years ago."

Revelations: Visionary Content in the Work of Southern Self-Trained Artists at the Atlanta College of Art in 1986 was the first exhibition in which Mr. Scott's work was included. The first one-man show of his work at a national museum was at the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio in 1993 (An Unexpected Orthodoxy: The Paintings of Lorenzo Scott). Through the efforts of Bert Hunecke, Mr. Scott's work has since been accepted into the permanent collections of museums in New York and Washington. He received the Folk Art Society of America’s Folk Art Distinction in 2002, which named him a “Modern Renaissance Painter of Folk Art.”