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Schueler: About the Sky Main Page

Jon Schueler Site

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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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To understand the Woman in the Sky paintings as Schueler conceived them is impossible without knowledge of their source. He wrote with great poignancy about his childhood. The death of his mother in his infancy, his subsequent knowledge of that fact, and more crucially, his own "forgetting" of that fact, were the source of pain and guilt that never left him. It was, for him, a mutual abandonment, of both child and mother. Moreover, it was only the first of the abandonments, the "disappearances," that were to follow. The boy was subsequently cared for by a tender nursemaid, then a much loved aunt, who were taken from him upon the marriage of his father to a remote and emotionally unattainable young woman, whom he later held responsible for an estrangement and actual separation from his maternal grandparents. His later attempt, as a young man, to reunite with this grandmother led only to his discovery of her death four years earlier.

Schueler's numerous affairs and marriages (five) were attempts to replace these lost women, as he himself recognized. Eventually, his effort to come to terms with these losses was to be through his art, with nature as a symbolic substitute for the lost women. "I know this loneliness that is in the paintings. I know the sense of the void." He described what he called his "primal image":
...this feeling of looking up...what I'm seeing is the blackness...the void...the sense of the world disappearing...the sense of searching for something that you knew had to be there which you couldn't find." "...it ultimately came into a search for the woman in the painting.
A Woman in Love, 1964, is exemplary of the early Woman Paintings in which the image can be seen clearly. "The woman was naked. She was lying with her head back. She was in an attitude of love or an attitude of birth. She was sensual and passionate. Her legs were spread. She was larger than life. (And so is life.)"
In Loch Eishort: Winter Dream, 1966, and Night Offering, 1976, the image of the woman is subsumed by the sky:
My intention was to gradually push her into the sky so that figuration would disappear. This I did, so that by 1967 one could possibly still feel the sensuality of the woman, though the figuration was no longer evident. And for some reason, in a very profound sense, she made me feel the architecture of a painting-whether one considered the painting as a whole or whether one felt the life force in a broad area of grey-the architecture was the relationship from space to space and time to time.
In the spring of 1964, Schueler invited his new dealer, Eleanor Ward of the Stable Gallery, where he had had shows in 1954, 1961 and 1963, to see the new pictures. The images of nudes sprawled in attitudes of love and abandon repelled her; Ward confessed that she had a personal hang-up about nudes stemming from earlier days. Under those circumstances, Schueler decided it best to end their association, and he was left once again without a gallery.
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http://www.artgallery.sbc.edu/exhibits/99_00/schueler/catalog6.html
This page was created and is maintained by Jaime Henna, 2002.
Direct questions or comments to Professor Rebecca Massie Lane, Director of the College Galleries and the Arts Management Program.
Last updated on February 6, 2000.