“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.
 |
| In the artist's studio, Chelsea, New York Installation shot of Trilogy Changes (A) (o/c 695), B (o/c 696), C (o/c 697) now on exhibition at the Wallace L. Anderson Gallery |
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.
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.
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.
Exhibition dates: January 21 - March 24, 2016, please see www.bsuarts.com for further information.
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 Whitney Balliett, Profiles, City Voices: Jon
Schueler and Magda Salvesen, op.cit., p.51
