Scott Prior ’71 has done it again – created a subtle, affectionate image of UMass Amherst for this magazine. Blimp, Buildings and Bovines, oil on wood panel, is only 10 by 12 inches, a kind of detailed miniature, “in the Dutch and Flemish tradition,” says Prior, the subjects combined here “with a humorous intent.” • The cows gaze directly at the viewer, as cows will, calm, unastonished. Unlike his previous UMass Magazine cover painting, View from Mount Holyoke, October 1996, Prior says this is “an imaginary painting. There’s no such spot.” Yet reality is in the way the view feels. “It’s such a familiar sight,” he says, this former agricultural college, now an academic “city” in the midst of what’s still a rural landscape. “I love the way you see it from a distance, coming down from the hills.” And the blimp? “I don’t know,” says the painter, “there’s something about a blimp that makes me smile.”

Scott Prior, 2003, by
Ben Barnhart

Self-portrait, 2001, Shamek Weddle