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Schueler: About the Sky Main Page
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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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The five-year Mallaig period (1970-75) had been one of great contentment. However, Salvesen's decision to leave Schueler and resume her education in order to earn teaching credentials, prompted him to leave the isolation of Mallaig and return to New York. Their separation ended the following year, 1976, when she joined him there. They married, and Salvesen was appointed to a teaching position at the Day School in New York. As husband and wife, they began to spend the academic year in New York and summers in Mallaig. Although the professional relationship with Heller was by this time waning, Schueler's career took a new turn. Exhibitions at the Landmark Gallery in New York in November and December, 1977, and at the House Gallery in London, 1978, brought his work to the attention of new audiences.
The Whitney Museum of American Art had honored Schueler with an exhibition in the spring of 1975. Before his retirement from the Whitney, Director Jack Baur had determined to give Schueler a show. For the brochure Baur wrote a perceptive essay of appreciation:
...One has only to compare them with the Highland skies to understand how true the paintings are to the light, the atmosphere, the dramatic spirit of the place.... And yet these are basically abstract pictures, not unrelated to the work of Mark Rothko or some of Clyfford Still's big canvases. They have that kind of largeness, mystery and power. They strike a more precarious balance between observation and abstract form than do most paintings that try to wed the two.... Schueler's solution is more difficult because it is less obvious. He risks more by deliberately exploring a narrow area where nothing is secure, where everything is changing, evanescent and evocative.... It is hardly necessary to add that their impact is unabashedly romantic and poetic.
Following that show, Sherman Lee, Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, presented Schueler's work, along with that of Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, in an exhibition called "Landscapes, Interior and Exterior: Avery, Rothko and Schueler," July 9 to August 31, 1975.
Night Offering, 1976, and Evening Blues, 1976, continue the direction of the works done earlier in the decade, with the introduction of soft pinks, lavenders, and blues. In the former, it is possible to sense the presence of the Woman in the Sky, but handled so subtly as to defy identification. Moreover, the images in both paintings can be seen as essentially sky or as containing sea and landscape forms as well. The same qualities appear in January Sleat: Light and Shadow, 1978; November, 1978; and Good-Bye to Oscar, 1978 (cat#26).
Together, in 1977, Schueler and Salvesen established their living and working space in a loft on West 22nd Street, New York. There they entertained a large circle of international artist and writer friends. Personal clients brought financial rewards, if not complete security. Schueler began a series of Blues in Grey paintings, works Salvesen described as images "tinged with sadness."
In September 1978, with the help of Salvesen's cousin, a career diplomat with knowledge of War Office records, Schueler found the long-lost Bunty. He wrote her a letter rich with reminiscence and tenderness, telling her of the role she had unknowingly played in the conception of his painting. They corresponded subsequently and finally reunited in the fall of 1980. The intervening years had wrought the inevitable physical changes on both, but for Schueler, his memories of the past were the reality. "...I have the memory, which goes deep and full, endlessly deep in all of its imaginings." He felt his debt to her for the rest of his life.
In 1981 Schueler was given an extraordinary opportunity to paint a series of very large canvases for a major exhibition at the Talbot Rice Art Centre of the University of Edinburgh. The director, Duncan Macmillan, wanted works on a heroic scale to fill the huge gallery spaces and hoped that Schueler would send him paintings from New York. The cost of shipping such canvases proved prohibitive, however, so Schueler conceived the idea of creating new works in situ. He set up a studio in the galleries themselves, and under these challenging circumstances successfully completed six grand-scale canvases entitled The Search.
Edinburgh Blues, 1981, was painted in front of the video camera during the filming of Jon Schueler Painting, a film made by the University of Edinburgh and available for viewing during this exhibition. To see the artist at work and to observe the evolution of the picture is to be made aware of the level of abstraction in his creative process. Working from his memories of the landscape, not from preparatory studies, Schueler creates an image that is uncannily "true" to directly observed nature. Baur's comment on the fine line between observation and abstraction is pertinent here. On the occasion when Heller had visited Schueler in Mallaig, his response to the actual landscape of the area prompted him to remark, " `What people don't realize... is that your work is completely abstract.... And then what they don't realize is that your work is absolutely real.' " Schueler was delighted. " `That's it.... That's exactly it. That's what I want. The abstract is real and the real is abstract. ...It's right in front of you. Right in front of your eyes. That's where the mystery is. That's where the truth lies.' "
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