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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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The Mallaig landscape also made Schueler aware of the importance of atmosphere for his paintings. He realized that in using the knife and very thick paint, he was inhibiting himself from realizing the presence of atmosphere in the paintings themselves. "So that was one of the reasons for moving from the knife to the brush. And then, gradually...through the years, to make the brush even more subtle, with thinner and thinner washes...wash over wash over wash...."
...the other thing that took place...when I was up here (Mallaig) in 1957/58, searching for an image...(was that) at a certain point the idea of the sun and the sunburst, but now relating to a horizon, came to my mind from looking at the skies up here.... I know that the light burst is always in a sense behind the painting, behind the feeling of the painting. I know it's there; it should be permeating that light when it's totally covered up by the clouds.
The couple left in March to travel in Italy and France, ending up in Paris, where Schueler eventually found a studio outside of the city in the suburb of Clamart. Jody returned to New York alone, and Schueler struggled with emotions relating to their break-up and with the difficulty of beginning a new series of paintings. Here, Schueler received a commission from the neighboring priests of the Passioniste order for a large painting to hang above the altar of their chapel. It was to be on the theme of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. The priests were enthusiastic about the resulting work, and Schueler regarded it as an important picture, "...both as a culmination of many ideas I had been expressing and as a force which will lead into the future." It led directly into a series of sun images.
Le Soleil, 1958, is one of a series of sun paintings that for Schueler held meaning in terms of his personal feelings about a male/female dichotomy, a notion related to the classic Apollonian/Dionysian split. "...Women... have led me into life and into mystery...and into the fantasy of life.... Whereas man has always led me into the idea of the rigours of reason, of challenge, of confrontation, of fight, of battle, of competition.... There have been these polarities." Among these paintings was one that Schueler titled My Father is the Sun, 1958, a homage to Turner, whose last words, according to legend, were: "The Sun is God." Schueler wrote,"...It was a sky, it was a snow cloud,...there was a glow of light...a glow of life coming through...the light of the father's intelligence."
In retrospect, Schueler described his pictures of this period in positive terms:
The paintings done in ...Clamart... were full of light. Many yellows, warm yellows, Indian yellows. Pale white skies. A brightness of life. A loveliness, a sense of beauty, of romance. One would think of most of them as joyous paintings. The Scottish paintings had been darker, brooding; the reds had been deeper, bloodier, the feeling of the north, a weight, a challenge. These paintings of Clamart were of another climate, softer, bathing one in a promise of spring.... I painted a number of yellow paintings, and pale whites with a surge of red at the sea. The yellow paintings were about the light. The sun was behind the storm, burning through the storm.... These must have been some of the most optimistic paintings that I have ever painted.
At the same time, lonely and feeling isolated, Schueler regarded the period in Clamart as a kind of trial, "...some kind of tremendous challenge and battle, which I had hoped I was winning with dignity and courage." Finishing a few more paintings, he left for London, and then traveled to Majorca, Spain, for relaxation. He visited his friend the writer Alastair Reid and met the poet Robert Graves. After this respite, he felt restored, and after considerable vacillation, decided not to return to New York City in the fall. Arranging a studio swap with the American painter Sam Francis, then living outside of Paris in Arcueil. Schueler stayed on for another four months, during which time he completed about eighteen paintings.
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