Keeping in touch with SCAD alumni is truly one of the best parts of my job as president. I think of our graduates as torchbearers, carrying the university’s legacy forth and bringing the magic of SCAD to new communities all over the world. That’s certainly what SCAD alumnus Britt Spencer did when he graduated with a BFA in illustration in 2005, then moved to Los Angeles to launch a career in children’s books.

Yet after a few years on the West Coast, Britt wanted more. He found himself at a crossroads – he could continue to pursue illustration, evolving his whimsical signature style, or he could develop an entirely new opus. A natural born adventurer, this Kentucky native journeyed back to SCAD, where he enrolled in the MFA painting program and set out for unknown territory. Nearly two years later, the humor and visual hyperbole that serve as Britt’s artistic calling card are still front and center, but he has added a few new tricks to his repertoire. The evidence: Britt’s recent thesis show featured hand-painted Russian nesting dolls, lending his folkloric style a brand new tangibility.

Of the difference between illustration and painting, Britt says the medium is the message. With illustration, he says, he begins with “an objective, something to communicate to an audience.” His painting, on the other hand, has become an object lesson in how not to communicate in a straightforward way – how to provide “red herrings” to disguise and redirect a viewer toward personal sources of meaning. Britt considers the two art forms so divergent that he refers to his paintings as “counterillustrations,” experimental and deliberate attempts to challenge an audience.

His artistic objectives notwithstanding, some things remain crystal clear: Britt is an extraordinarily gifted SCAD alumnus, and his work – by turns playful and somber, mythic and familiar – has only just begun its ascent.