Gary Kott

Gary Kott has five pieces of his artwork, three paintings and two sculptures, held over at Smith Vargas Fine Art in Palm Springs after a successful featured-artist show there in January, 2016. His painting "Veer" has been selected by the Palm Springs Art Museum Artists Council/University of California, Riverside for a show running from March 3 through April 22, 2016. Kott's artwork has been selected for viewing at the Rancho Mirage Artists Studio Tour to be held on March 19, 2016. His recent solo show at the Cathedral City Chamber of Commerce ran for three months. Kott's "Think Stripe" show at his studio/gallery was attended by more than 150 people.

Kott's artists statement reads: I studied art in college but never pursued it until I was well established as a professional scriptwriter in Hollywood. Several factors were responsible for my eventual transition from pen to paint, most importantly a stack of eight-foot by ten-foot sheets of plywood found in the basement of a new house I bought. A week before I’d seen a large, expensive painting in a gallery, a bold color field of red and black. Hmm, I thought, these sheets of plywood were exactly the same size. A quick trip to the local art supply store and I had my first color field hanging over my bed, joined soon by eight-foot by ten-foot color fields in the living room and den. In time I expanded into multi-dimensional sculptures made from junk I treasure-hunted in landfills and city dumps. I was delighted to see people enjoy my typewriters made from carriage bolts and ABS pipe, my seven-foot, found-object guitars oozing in reds, blues, and greens. My paintings moved from plywood to canvas, my color-fields from free-flowing drips to tightly controlled stripes. My evolution from pen to paint has been an exploration of anything and everything I dream up, always capturing images and notions where words fail me.

Gary Kott was an American television and advertising writer. A writer and supervising producer of The Cosby Show, Kott worked on the program during its five consecutive years of number one Nielsen ratings.^[1]

Career

Kott worked on Madison Avenue in the early 1970s, writing and producing dozens of national television commercials and print ads. He was a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, moved to Young & Rubicam, then moved back to Ogilvy & Mather, where he served as Vice President and Creative Director.

Hollywood

In addition to his time working on The Cosby Show, Kott has also written for other shows, including Fame, Remington Steele and The White Shadow. He has received numerous accolades, including a Peabody Award, a Writers Guild of America Award, a People's Choice Award, an NAACP Image Award, a pair of Humanitas nominations, and one Emmy Award nomination. Kott has been a guest speaker at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Theater

Kott has written numerous plays, with performances at The Actors Studio in New York, The Grove Street Playhouse and The Santa Monica Playhouse.

Gary Kott's Creative Warehouse

In 2011, Kott launched Gary Kott's Creative Warehouse, a website devoted to collecting his work, including art, stories and plays. In addition to writing a series of blog entries on the site, Kott has also introduced the concept of the "Storynar," a live webcast of the reading of an original story.

References

External links

• Gary Kott at the Internet Movie Database
• Gary Kott's Creative Warehouse