Although she always liked to paint and draw—she took drawing classes throughout her school days—Dorothy Carnine Scott postponed an art career in favor of teaching Latin. Only when she was in her late twenties did Scott, by then a professor’s wife, began to pursue art in earnest in 1930.
Scott was born in Hannaford, North Dakota, a small rural community in the east-central part of the state. In 1925 Scott received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She graduated with honors, magna cum laude and was married the year after in 1926. From 1927 until 1945 she was living in Amherst, Virginia, where her husband Dr. Ewing C. Scott, was a professor of chemistry at Sweetbriar College. Elizabeth Hunt Barrett, an academically trained painter four decades her senior, served as Scott’s mentor, and together they explored the countryside of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.
In 1932 Scott studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center under Ward Lockwood and Boardman Robinson and returned there six years later for further instruction. Closer to home, she took classes at the Lynchburg Art Club, where Eliot Clark was one of her teachers. She exhibited at the Club, Sweetbriar College, and the Southern States Art League. In 1944 she had a solo show as part of the Virginia Artists Series at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Scott also continued her formal education, attending the University of Chicago where she earned a master’s degree in 1935, and at Syracuse University where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in library science in 1948.
Scott’s primary subject matter consisted of landscapes; the ones painted in rural Virginia frequently feature mountains in the background, as do many of her depictions of Southwestern topography. Scott traveled extensively with her husband to such locales as Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, and Hawaii, and following his death in 1965 she made a nine-month trip around the world. Her canvases inclined toward brightly colored traditional compositions. Late in life she retired to Estes Park, Colorado, and turned to lithography in which the imagery is more tightly focused on people and birds.