“Mapping Memory: Jon Schueler Skyscapes” at the Wallace
L. Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State University (BSU) is the inaugural exhibition to
mark the Centenary of the American artist, Jon Schueler (1916-1992). Schueler’s
commitment to arts education – he was a visiting artist and teacher at the
Maryland Institute, Baltimore, the University of Illinois and the Yale University
School of Art - makes BSU a particularly fitting venue. The Anderson Gallery's
curatorial goal “to establish an environment of learning, enrichment and
inspiration with exhibitions that illuminate the direct relationship between
the Arts and Ideas,” 1 is
in keeping with the artist’s own ethos.
This shared vision permeates the exhibition, encouraging both students
and visitors to actively participate in the paintings, exploring their own ideas
and thoughts, moods and memories in response to the art.
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| Burning Blues (o/c 1278), 1982, Oil on Canvas, 66 x 66 inches |
A selection of seven skyscapes from the 1970s and early 1980s drawn
entirely from the artist’s estate, the exhibition includes a rarely seen
significant trilogy Changes (A), (B) & (C), 1976. Painted a year
after two seminal museum shows for the artist in 1975 - a solo show at the
Whitney Museum of American Art and a three-man show “Landscapes, Interior
and Exterior: Avery, Rothko and Schueler” at the Cleveland Museum of Art - this
dramatic series embodies a lifetime ambition to capture from memory the
evocative and fleeting moods of the sky on canvas.
Schueler’s skyscapes are as fresh and vibrant as the day they were painted. Moving
from one painting to the next, we feel compelled to follow the artist’s
delicately wistful, yet powerful brushstrokes. They pull us in, through layers
of light and shadow, through the sky and beyond. Rich buttery yellows,
pulsating reds and soft powdery blues invite us to step into and be consumed by
an enthralling transformative world. Everything is moving. Nothing is still.
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| Red Sky Over The Sound Of Sleat, XI (o/c 214), 1972, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 44 inches |
Taught by Clyfford Still (1904-80), who became the artist’s mentor and
briefly by Mark Rothko (1903-70) and Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) at the California
School of Fine Arts in 1949 and1950, Schueler went on to actively exhibit in
New York within the prevailing vanguard of Abstract Expressionism, with notable
solo shows at the Stable Gallery
(1954) and the Leo Castelli gallery (1957). By the mid 1970s, he had been integrated within
the art canon as a “Second Generation” Abstract Expressionist of the New York
School. However, the artist’s influences were always much more diverse than
this category suggests and included literary and musical (especially jazz)
figures outside narrow Abstract Expressionist circles. 2
Schueler’s artistic sensibilities were particularly aligned with
Romantic landscape artists such as the English painter, J.M.W. Turner (1775 –
1851). The endless potential of nature and sky as transformative forces for
painterly expression was clear to the artist from the time that Still showed
reproductions of Turner’s work at art school. The painter’s attention to the ever-changing
character of the natural environment and in particular skies, struck a
resounding cord with Schueler who increasingly believed that the sky held all
things: “The sky gave me the freedom to respond. It changes, shifts, moves,
there is no form it cannot become: there is no change that cannot take place. Each moment is its own. It mirrors life’s infinite change, infinite variety,
infinite possibility.” 3
An all-consuming passion, the sky became the creative force behind a
lifetime dedicated to painting landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes in a
distinctive style that combined his background in abstraction with his sensory experience
of nature. Growing up in Milwaukee, Schueler recalled the impact of the vast
and dramatic Wisconsin skies on his formative years. “I remember
thunderheads forming over Lake Michigan, when I was a child … The power within
the thunderheads, light, cloud, lake sky, beating and throbbing, waves pounding
the shore, sky mystery endless – I wanted to be sucked up into it and be part
of its power.”4 However, his experience
flying as a navigator on bombing missions during World War II had the most
profound influence on him. Sitting in a Plexiglas-nose of the B-17 bomber he
found a compelling beauty in the skies to equal the horrors: “There in combat
and before, the sky held all things, life and death and fear and joy and love.
It held the incredible beauty of nature. It was the storm and the enemy
gracefully flashing by and the friend waving from the crippled ship. It was the
memory of a beautiful woman.”5
Stream of Vapor, 1982 captures the essence of a sky rich in lamenting
beauty. As we search for reference points on the horizon, our attempts are
stalled by a restless fluidity in the layering of paint – a light gray that
covers a dark gray and underneath another gray of an even darker hue. A visual
metaphor for the layering of memory, Schueler’s minimal shifts in color palate
not only evoke the ethereal nature of recapturing past experience, but imbue
the painting with the deep sense of searching. The title suggests a profoundly
personal artwork - possibly a reference to his wartime flying experience – without
sacrificing its universal appeal. We have all traced the contrails in the sky
to conjure up memories of past journeys and forgotten or lost connections. This
search motif is enhanced by a positive sense of renewal that delicately winds
its way across the painting, in patches of brilliant blue that are in
deliberate counterpoint to the layers of gray.
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| Stream Of Vapor (o/c 1261), 1982, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches |
During World War II Schueler met and fell in love with Bunty Challis who
served in the American Ambulance Corps in England. In their short but intense
relationship, she shared with the artist her experience of the wild and
isolated Scottish Highlands. Bunty and
her stories made an indelible impression on Schueler who first visited the
remote Scottish fishing village of Mallaig in the winter of 1957-58. He would
later leave the States and return to the scenic hamlet in 1970 for a five-year
intense period of painting. Stimulated
by the continually shifting Northern skies and turbulent weather conditions of
the Western Highlands, Schueler finally found the natural environment to
satisfy his artistic ambitions. Surrendering to the isolation, the artist
refined his artistic vision with compelling clarity: “When I speak of
nature, I speak of the sky, because the sky has become all of nature to me. But
it is most particularly the brooding, storm-ridden sky over the Sound of Sleat
in which I find the living image of past dreams, dreams which had emerged from
memory and the swirl of paint.”6
When Schueler returned to New York in 1975 his mind was fueled with
vivid memories of the atmospheric skies of Northern Scotland. During this time
of immense creativity, he set to work high up in loft studios first on Jones
Street in Greenwich Village, then from 1977 in Chelsea. The New York sky
pressing in through every window contributed to his invigorated creative
perspective, the interior of the studio providing him with a transformative
space that enabled him to get “inside the space. My nose right up against
the canvas, losing sight of the edges, of the limitations, trying to feel the
lack of boundary, even as the boundary forms the limitless space.”7
Thrilled by the possibility of painting on larger canvases again,
Schueler embarked on the trilogy Changes (A), (B) & (C) completed in
1976. The series represents new dimensions, sought during a period of inner
creative strength. Schueler recalled:“Before, my paintings seem to me
to speak of the violence of motion and emotion. Now that motion is still there
but quiet and invisible half the time.”8 Encouraging
meditation and wide open to interpretation, the trilogy appears limitless,
infused with an ever-changing light and lyricism. The title “Changes” possibly references
Scotland’s fluid weather patterns that had become so familiar and vital to the
artist.
A highly personal vision, the trilogy seeks to make the
invisible visible. It could also be interpreted as a metaphorical search for the
restoration of time past through the medium of oil paint. A key concern for the
artist was connecting the materiality of the medium with ephemeral experience
and emotions. A living thing in itself, hovering effortlessly between nature
and artifice as if poised between two worlds, the series invites intense
contemplation from within us.
In Search for Oscar, 1983, with the delicate beauty of its palpable blues,
is a powerful example of the artist reflecting on memories past to come to
terms with loss. In this elegy marking the passing of a close friend and
talented jazz musician, Oscar Pettiford (1922-1960), the artist’s graceful
brush strokes mirror the bassist’s natural improvised jazz rhythms. For
Schueler, painting was necessary for self-preservation. It connected him with
the past and reinvigorated his present; the skyscapes attest to his constant
search for lost connections and suppressed memories. “My battle is the
battle for memory. In the painting, it is finally in the nuance of the
brushstroke, in the disturbance of color or the suggestion of line. The
moment’s space. It is the poetry about the poetry of paint. This is the area of
combat; that is the contrail, which shows where I’ve been and what has
happened, for that is the happening.” 9
Communicating “the happening” was essential to the artist and the sky paintings
on view at BSU certainly speak to this creative force. Inviting our participation the works are part
of an ongoing ever-changing continuum - “windows in the walls”10 - with no beginning or end point. No
matter where our eyes move, the paintings move with us to reveal intense
momentary compressions of movement and change. Never static, surfaces remain in
constant motion, with a single horizon line continuing indefinitely from one
canvas to the next, headed towards the sublime.
Schueler well understood the dichotomy that his painting was rooted in. At the same time he embraced nature as part of life’s ongoing continuum,
he knew that the painting inevitably subjected this vitality to a fixed form
and it is precisely this tension that deeply informs the work: “Change is
constant. So is surprise. Once a canvas is finished, the paint is frozen there.
Yet, it has a inner life, and as day moves over it it changes.”11 We can trace an inner dimension
pulsating through the exhibition; the variations of color, light and mood contingent
on the visceral particularity of time and weather, seek to unveil emotional
responses within us. Each canvas therefore poses a new opportunity for deep personal
contemplation, exploration and interpretation.
Diana Ewer, New York, 2015
1 Jay Block, Statement of
Curatorial Philosophy for the Wallace L. Anderson Gallery, see link:
http://www.bsuarts.com/about.html
2 Jon Schueler strove to
“accept every painter, from caveman to the present, as a contemporary, to
accept or reject them as influences upon my work, not because of their place in
art history but because of their effect upon my sensibilities and my mind.”
Extract from Jon Schueler The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life, edited
by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau, Picador USA, 1999, p.222.
He
embraced a vast range of artistic influences within a far-reaching circle of creative
friends, making regular trips to Europe studying the work of the Italian
Masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo (1475-1564), as well later
work by Francisco Goya (1746-1828), J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and Claude Monet (1840-1926).
Schueler’s close-knit peer group included artists, musicians and literary
figures such as: artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), jazz musician Oscar
Pettiford (1922-1960), Scottish poet Alastair Reid (1926–2014) and art critic Irving
Sandler (1925- ).
3“Jon Schueler: An Artist
and His Vision”, DVD, 1971. Quoted from an interview with Jon Schueler filmed
in Mallaig, Scotland.
4 Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A
Painter’s Life, edited by Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau, Picador USA, 1999,
p.131
5 Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A
Painter’s Life, op. cit., p.296
6 Whitney Museum of American Art, Jon
Schueler, exhibition brochure, April 24 – May 25, 1975. The Sound of Sleat
is a narrow sea channel off the western coast of Scotland. It divides the Sleat
peninsular on the south east side of the Isle of Sky from Morar, Knoydart and
Glenelg on the Scottish mainland.
7
Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life, op. cit., p. 280
8 Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s
Life, op. cit., p. 202
9
Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life, op. cit., p.296
10
Whitney Balliett, Profiles, City Voices: Jon Schueler and Magda Salvesen,
op.cit., p.36
11
