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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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Author's Note: Many of the quotations in this essay are taken from Jon Schueler's autobiography, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life, a journey of self-exploration that illuminates his life and art in a manner unsurpassed in our time. Precedents are no less than the journals of Delacroix and the letters of van Gogh, documents that Schueler knew and revered. The paintings themselves, it hardly needs saying, exist independently of the artist's words and need no verbal support, but Schueler's comments provide contexts that enrich one's understanding of his themes and artistic processes. His willingness to share his dreams and passions, his fears, insecurities, and human frailties, was an act of generosity for which his reading and viewing audiences are deeply grateful.
Jon Schueler's arrival in New York City in August 1951 was timely. The New York School, or Abstract Expressionism as it was more generally called, was in the ascendant. By 1954 he had earned a one-person exhibition in the Stable Gallery and following that, in 1957 and 1959, in the Leo Castelli Gallery, where his paintings were selling well for those days. Schueler felt "wedded" to New York, "in the middle of it," he said. One might have expected that the young painter's future was secure and that he would settle in among colleagues and friends to enjoy the success that the movement had by then achieved. As Schueler's work developed, however, his search for imagery based on vast horizons stirred memories of Scotland, memories based not on experience but on vivid descriptions.
More than a decade earlier, as a B-17 navigator for the Air Corps of the United States Army, Schueler had learned of this wild and isolated territory from Bunty Challis, an English woman he loved deeply who was then serving in the American Ambulance Corps in England. They lost track of each other after the war.
She was English, but she loved Scotland. And because she understood something very personal about me, she thought I would love Scotland, too. Most particularly, she thought that I would love the Highlands, and often she would describe them to me. I created the most powerful images from her descriptions. They were images of a sea and land and sky beyond mystery.
When I left England, the images stayed with me. Perhaps they grew in intensity. They were lonely, haunting images, possessed of the strange space of rain and storm. In some ways, they partook of the poetry of war, and may have been, in part, my memory of a war sky....
Her description of the area as a beautiful, harsh and lonely place of turbulent sea and skies made an indelible impression on the young flier, for Schueler had grown up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, under the vast and dramatic skies of the upper mid-west.
I remember thunderheads forming over Lake Michigan, when I was a child, and later, one summer, when I stayed alone at my grandfather's farm on the edge of the lake near Sheboygan. I remember...watching rainsqualls beating on the lake and the towering forms, black to me now, containing fantastic power, lightning flashes, crash and roll of thunder, wisps of rain against the screen. The power within the thunderheads, light, cloud, lake sky, beating and throbbing, waves pounding on the shore, sky mystery endless-I wanted to be sucked up into it and be a part of its power.
More importantly, he had faced death within the sky, confined in the Plexiglas nose of his war plane. It was inevitable that these events would mark him in a profound way. Unlike the first generation of Abstract Expressionists he had actually experienced combat in the Second World War.
A curious vantage point for living in the sky. Most of my paintings now, paintings of the sea and sky, are painted from an angle of view which I'm sure springs from those flying days. There, in combat and before, the sky held all things, life and death and fear and joy and love. It held-it was-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.
After the war ended, Schueler and his wife, Jane, (née Elton) settled in Los Angeles, where their two daughters were born. His pre-war education had fostered a desire to be a writer1 and he wanted to tell the story of his war experiences. Amidst a busy domestic life and a variety of hectic attempts to earn a living, he and Jane, as a lark, enrolled in a portrait painting class with David Lax, a generous and encouraging teacher. After a rocky start, Schueler began to find his way. "They were crude, those first portraits, but I can see them still and can see in them the characteristics that became my later work....The coarseness is still there, and so is the sensitivity." From that time on, painting became Schueler's passion. Although his writing occupied him erratically over the years, when asked what he did, he would always say that he was a painter.
In San Francisco, where he and the family moved in 1947 so that he could teach English Literature at the University of San Francisco, Schueler enrolled part-time in the California School of Fine Arts. "...There I was in San Francisco, and it turned out to be one of the great periods of any art school...in the United States..." By 1949, with assistance from the G. I. Bill, he was studying full-time under the very highly regarded West Coast painters Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park and Clay Spohn. Schueler was especially impressed by Still, who soon became his mentor and who, in 1951, suggested that he move to New York City as he himself had in 1950. Schueler was by then ready to seek an expansion of his talents "in a more demanding and competitive environment." There Still introduced him to his own circle of friends and he met the men who would soon become the major artists of the New York School.
Schueler recognized Still as a person of enormous personal integrity, rigor, and self-discipline. Further, he regarded him as far more revolutionary than the New Yorkers. In Still's painting he sensed a more radical, often disturbing and therefore thrilling, approach to space.1 However, he credited Still, Pollock, and other painters of the New York School with inspiring a great sense of freedom in the handling of paint, to the extent that it would respond to the artist's ideas and feelings, rather than to the demands of what was being seen or of a formal concept. Schueler's Orange and White, 1952, in its vertical emphasis and insistent knife strokes, can be seen both as a homage to his mentor and as an attempt to make his own way, through Still, towards a more personal statement. He was, of course, well aware of Still's exclusion of horizontals and of his own preference for them. As he noted, some of his own San Francisco paintings "would automatically form themselves to sea and sky. Black sea, red sky. Non-objective, but to do with nature. A strong vertical movement would have been a forced gesture."
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