Jon Schueler
S ea to Sk y
Jon Schueler | S ea to Sk y
Resipole Studios and Fine Art Gallery are delighted to be hosting a
collection of multi-media artworks by the late, abstract expressionist,
Jon Schueler (1916 -1992). Sea to Sky is one of a group of exhibitions,
both in the US and in the UK to mark the centennial of Jon Schueler’s
birth. Sea to Sky presents a collection of thirty eight works that are
central to his time spent on the West Coast of Scotland, which he
frequented throughout his career. For Jon Schueler the sky was his
main inspiration and in 1970 he moved for five years from New York
to a studio in Mallaig, where he could surrender himself visually to
the tempestuous elements of the Scottish coastline and where (many
critics believe) he refined his artistic focus.
When I speak of nature, I’m speaking of the sky....And when I think
of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig. Time was there
and motion was there. Lands forming, seas disappearing, words
fragmenting, colours giving birth to burning shapes.
Jon Schueler, It is magazine 1960.
1977, Jon Schueler in Romasaig, Mallaig,
Scotland. Photo: Archie I. McLellan.
1975, Jon Schueler's studio, Romasaig, in
Mallaig, Scotland. Photo: Magda Salvesen.
Resipole Studios and Fine Art Gallery, the award winning arts venue,
is enveloped by the very landscape that inspired the American artist
and provides the perfect backdrop to Schueler’s works of art.
The exhibition will run for six weeks (6 August - 18 September
2016) and will feature a number of events celebrating Jon Schueler’s
centennial.
Resipole Studios are grateful to be working with Rob Fairley and the
Jon Schueler estate on the curation and planning of this collection
and exhibition.
First published 2016 by Resipole Studios Publishing.
The copyright of the individual contributions remain with the respective authors.
The copyright on all the artwork remain with the Jon Schueler Estate.
2
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Jon Schueler | Poet as Painter
A key passage in Jon Schueler's amazing life-story, The Sound of Sleat, occurs twice: first, as part of the introduction
by Russell Banks, and then later, towards the end of the book. It tells of Schueler in August 1974 walking with his
friend, the collector Ben Heller, along the 'Burma Road' that runs along the top of the cliffs of Mallaig looking across
the Sound of Sleat to the Cuillin Hills and islands of the Inner Hebrides. Here is the relevant passage:
And there it was all spread out in front of us. We sat and rested awhile. "What people don't realise," [Heller]
said, "is that your work is completely abstract." I nodded. "And then what they don't realise is that your work
is absolutely real." "That's it, Ben,' I said. “That's exactly it. That's what I want. The abstract is real and the real
is abstract. It's right in front of your eyes. That's where the mystery is. That's where the truth lies.”*
Whatever else can be said of Jon Schueler's painting in his centenary year, this passage is its passport out of the
period clichés of abstract expressionism into what we like to think of as immortality. That Schueler was a Romantic
out of his time, a passionate writer in paint and a compulsively honest painter in words, seems less important now
than that he heroically refused to abandon reality. However much his technique was abstract while his subject was
himself, it was the real world he observed to be changing before his eyes, the real Scottish weather he captured in
his studies of sea-light and storm, just as it was the real turmoil of his life he observed as he searched for fulfilment
in women, in aerial combat or in his studies of flesh and of the sky. For a writer to register the ups and downs of
a difficult life and temperament is not unusual, especially in these times; for a painter to do so in both paint and
words is rare. I can think of nothing more praiseworthy in Jon Schueler's work than his ability to paint abstractly
while feeling and thinking poetically yet realistically - in his response to nature.
Anne Stevenson
Poet and writer
May 2016
* Jon Schueler, The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life, Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau, eds. (New York; Picador, 1999)
Introduction pp. xx and p. 350
3
April 1974, Ben and Pat Heller with Jon Schueler on a walk from Mallaig Vaig.
Photo: Magda Salvesen
Joseph Beuys in discussion with Jon Schueler along with John Halpern and Wenzel Beuys at the
Talbot Rice Art Centre 1981. Photo: Richard Demarco archives 2008
4
Mallaig, Fighting Cocks and Angry Penguins
A personal view of the work of Jon Schueler
On Sunday the 5th of May 1968 I woke up in the early hours of the morning on the floor of Mallaig Primary School
where I and the rest of a small school party bound for St Kilda had spent the night. Peering out of the window I was
faced with a miraculous moving miasma of growing greenish grey slowly turning a tin flat pink. My diary records
that it was impossible to paint.
It is impossible now to imagine the excitement that Richard Demarco’s gallery in Edinburgh’s Melville Street had in
the late 1960’s and 70’s. Look at this programme for 10 weeks in 1969 (apart from anything else 10 shows of Scottish
painters then hardly household names):
1969 (August/ September) Six One-Man Shows: William Crozier, James Howie, Rory McEwen, Paul Neagu, Yago
Pericot and William Scott. Geoff Moore’s Moving Being with The Incredible String Band. Recitals by Salamat and
Nazakat Ali Khan (Pakistan). Cambridge Footlights with Clive James, Tony Buffery and Pete Atkin.
1969 (September) Two Canadians and Three Scots: Robert Downing, Jack Wise. Neil Dallas Brown, John Knox, James
Morrison.
1969 (October) Pat Douthwaite. Michael Roschlau. Experimental Poetry: Visual, Concrete and Kinetic, by Breakwell,
Cobbing, Furnival, Houedard, Morgan, Burroughs. Lindsay Kemp, The White Pantomime.1
The gallery introduced me to so much (I remember seeing a show by the Australian Arthur Boyd with the paint still
wet on the canvasses) and one day, a chill dreich late February afternoon in 1971 I walked into one of the rooms
to find my memory jangling back to May ’68, for here were a group of paintings which extraordinarily captured
the slow moving light seen from the Mallaig Primary School window. My surprise was intensified when I found the
titles were along the lines of Winter Series Eigg or Blues Mallaig Grey. It seemed that what I had deemed impossible
to paint was indeed possible and much was my astonishment when I discovered the artist to be a man I had never
heard of - an American living in Mallaig, Jon Schueler.
Two years later, in 1973 my studio space in Edinburgh College of Art was taken over during the Edinburgh
Festival for a vast wonderful show by Schueler. We shared a cup of tea but I was too shy to talk. In 1975 I moved
to Mallaig and Jon moved to New York - I spent a fortnight while he was in residence in Romasaig, plucking up
the courage to knock on the door. I never did. Maybe it is just as well, for my work, while being in the form of
painting and drawings, was actually a recording of an ephemeral “land art” (though the term was hardly invented)
which eventually grew into Room 13. We may have had nothing in common. However we may have done.
1 http://www.demarco-archive.ac.uk/richard_demarco_chronology.pdf
5
I hold few heroes. However, I went to Edinburgh College of Art because Robin Philipson was head of the school of
Drawing and Painting. I share(d) the Sound of Sleat with Jon Schueler and I have aye been more than impressed
(influenced?) by the work of the Australian artist Sidney Nolan. There is a strange correlation:
Robin Philipson born 17th December 1916, died 26th May 1992
Jon Schueler born 12th September 1916, died 5th August 1992
Sidney Nolan born 22nd April 1917, died 28th November 1992
All three were born and died within six months of each other. All three
painted works which have similar themes. Big themes. They attempted to
paint the opposing forces that beset the human condition - the physical, the
spiritual; life, death; pleasure, pain; profound love, violent strife; darkness,
light. The work of all three was profoundly affected by the Second World
War. I am certain that Philipson and Schueler met at the big Schueler
show in ECA in 1973 and I know that Philipson and Nolan met. It would be
interesting to know if Nolan and Schueler’s paths ever crossed.
In 1975 John Baur wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition of Schueler’s work
in the Whitney Museum in New York:
Jon Schueler with model Mary Rogers,
photo by Maren Heyne 1965
Jon Schueler has walked a difficult path between opposites. His paintings look abstract but are not. The
character of the Scottish coast, where he lives, speaks through these poetic canvasses with remarkable
clarity and exactness. One has only to compare them with the Highland skies to understand how true the
paintings are to the light, the atmosphere and 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 canvasses.
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 - such as those of Milton
Avery or Georgia O’Keeffe, to name at random artists who have succeeded in their own way. 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. We see his paintings
one minute as clouds and sea and islands, the next as swirling arrangements of pure colour and light.2
On the cover was a reproduction of Ode to Bunty, A Winter Dream.3
It is a passage which has become the touchstone for those writing about Schueler, and while it is undoubtedly
2
3
6
Jon Schueler, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1975
Sound of Sleat, p. 351
correct at one level, I believe there are another two strands (or themes) to his work. Very obviously flying through
the clouds during the Second World War - being part of the sky and a sky in which death was a horrible possibility was a major influence. But there is another theme deeper, more personal and maybe one more basic and harder to
understand, for it is possible that it is a theme visible and understandable only to men. I do not write this with any
sexist intention but there are parts of being male which women cannot understand or feel, just as there are many
parts of being female that men can not feel or understand. Women’s painting is inherently different (not better, not
worse, just different) to men’s, particularly when dealing with the big themes of life and death.
Gustav Mahler’s vast 3rd symphony, written between 1893 and 1896, is ‘about’ nature - creation possibly. It is in six
broad movements, the final one entitled “What Love Tells Me” and this can be read (heard) as a remarkably accurate
description of what sex feels like to a man. A driving rhythm, which builds, then slows and relaxes, and builds and
surges again to eventually explode into a glorious and ecstatic conclusion. (Even Mahler’s notes can be read with
this in mind - where the dynamics rise to fortissimo he writes “not with raw force but saturated and gentle”.) The
conductor Bruno Walter (who visited Mahler during the composition of the symphony) wrote that this “ - adagio,
with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole - and despite passages of burning pain - eloquent of comfort and
grace. It is a single sound of heartfelt and exalted feelings, in which the whole giant structure finds its culmination.”4
By definition only men can feel and recognise the composer’s depiction of building to ejaculation and orgasm.5
Schueler’s paintings are also about sex. He never hid his love for the company of women and was married five times.
I love women. I like to look at women. I like to feel them and touch them. I wish that I could find the way
to feeling and touching them, to making love to them, without disturbing Magda, but rather, with, in some
way, including her in the joy, in the looking , in the touching, in the talking, in the friendliness, in the passion.
- Why is it so joyous? I’ve looked on flesh a thousand times. Girls I have taken to bed. Girls in my studio. Yet it
is always new, always exciting, always a joy. I feel more receptive now than ever more. I’d like to see old bodies,
young bodies. Large and small. Tiny breasts, huge breasts. Everything. It’s like the sea and the sky.
(17th July 1977 Mallaig) 6
4
Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, Greystone Press 1941 and Gustav Mahler’s III Symphonie in Der Merker
10th October 1909 (untranslated until quoted by Jack Diether, Unicorn Kanchana, 1988)
5 It is worth noting that Mahler at one point thought of calling his 3rd Symphony Pan, Symphonic Poems
(remembering that Pan was the Greek God of fertility) and Mahler, on the day he completed the symphony had
joked with Natalie Bauer-Lechner (a close and devoted friend in the period between the end of her marriage in
1890 and the start of his to Alma Schindler in 1902) “ - just as long as nothing happens to me today - for no one
but me could complete the sixteen bars of the gigantic fanfare which I get Pan, in my Bacchic march, to extract
from the whole uproarious rabble.” Mahler Symphony No 3. Peter Franklin. Cambridge University Press. 1991. p. 89
Sound of Sleat p. 284
6
7
As early as 1963 he had written,
I was terribly excited. For years I had been dreaming of the woman in the sky. In no way did I feel sure of
myself. But I felt on the edge of knowing. I realised that I would have to look at woman and try to paint
her. For years I had tried to understand how I could include the woman, and this always meant somehow
technically submerging her in my image. The few starts I had made had proved to be neither one thing nor
the other. Moreover, I had the idea of looking at woman, studying her, drawing from her, but not painting
from the model. I conceived the idea of painting from the woman - looking at her, painting from her, yet
embracing the struggle of freeing myself from her.
(3rd January 1963 New York) 7
And
my father’s sperm splattering the dynamic patterns of conception in the dark red womb night that led to
my being. In paintings, one way or another, I have tried to talk of these things - birth, life and death - and
hope I shall again.
(September 1963, New York)8
Writing about sex as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce (and many others since) have discovered, is not easy and using
it as a base for image making quickly moves into an area seen as pornographic. Schueler acknowledges this: “I
think of what is considered obscene”9, and constantly works out ways for his underlying vision to be integrated
with his understanding and exploration of painting and of the land. This is not unique. Some years ago, in an early
conversation with the artist then known as Marshall Anderson, a man utterly engaged with image making ground
out of the land and landscape, he asked me whether I had ever been sexually excited whilst watching a sunset or
an approaching storm.10 I conceded that I had not but agreed that I could see and understand the possibility the possibility of reacting to the land in the most basic and “real” way possible. This, I argue, is what Schueler was
attempting.
Much of how he writes has an almost mystical land/sexual duality, and it is interesting to note that in 1979 Gunther
Stuhlmann who had edited the five volumes of AnaÏs Nin’s diaries for publication - surely one of the best attempts
at an explanation of a woman’s sexuality (but by definition could I know?) considered taking on Schueler’s memoir
/ come diary “The Sound of Sleat”.11 In the following passage Schueler is trying to describe an experience of seeing
7
Sound of Sleat p. 137
8
Sound of Sleat p. 143
9
3rd February 1963 (Sound of Sleat p. 141)
10 See correspondence between Marshall Anderson and Rob Fairley, National Library of Scotland
(Acc.13227) HP4.95.1245
11
Footnote The Sound of Sleat p. 351
8
the land but it could equally be an attempt at explaining the feeling, physically and mentally, of that strange mix of
post coital bliss and dysphoria many men experience.
The vision was intensely real, yet it was the most powerful abstraction - nature a cold, stately presence, remote
and unconcerned, beyond man’s definitions, his identifications, his attempts at understanding, oblivious to
his emotion. Man could only be irrelevant in the face of this implacable event, this dark and light of eternal
death. Everything about the Sound of Sleat that I might have remembered, every colour, shape or form, the
identity of sky, land or water was destroyed and replaced by those events that I can only call the unearthly
light, the dark, dark, rich beyond the black, the mass of grey, and the deep shimmering of a streak below, a
presence more powerful, more beautiful, more seductive, more real than man’s fantasies of poetry or joy or
the damnation of his days.12
The only other artist to find such a brilliant duality in their work (but could I tell?) was Georgia O’ Keeffe (and it is
interesting to note that Baur cites her in his introduction to the 1975 Whitney exhibition) though, of course, the
present “O’ Keeffe” exhibition in Tate Modern seeks to change this “conservative male” - and widely accepted assumption “and turn her into a “multifaceted artist”, exploring in particular her relationship to photography, music
and the landscape” 13 I think I want the same multifaceted understanding for Schueler.
Edward Said’s persuasive essays On Late Style14 makes clear that very often the resolutions of a life time’s artistic
endeavours are rife with unresolved contradictions and almost impenetrable complexity and they often stand in
direct contrast to the tastes of society. He writes (in talking about Britten’s Death in Venice) of the space between
“figures of nearness and distance” (the ‘woman in the sky’ and the land), between the subjective and the objective,
“objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which - alone - it glows into life. The artist (Schueler)
does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of disassociation, he tears them apart in time, in
order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.”15
Schueler’s late work in New York in the early 1990s was once again done from a life model,16 suggesting once more
the potency of female sexuality within the rhythms of his painting.
Rob Fairley
Artist and Founder of Room13
12
Sound of Sleat p. 189
13 Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian 1st March 2016
14
On Late Style Edward Said, Bloomsbury 2006
15
On Late Style p. 160
16
Jon Schueler: To the North Nordland and Ingleby published Merril 2002 page 40, fig 44
9
Watercolour 57 1972, 15 x 12 cm, Watercolour
10
Watercolour 70-19, 1970, 14 x 17 cm, Watercolour
11
Watercolour 10, 1972, 15 x 22 cm, Watercolour
12
Eigg: Shadow and Sun I, 1972, 51 x 61 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 255)
13
14
I
II
III
IV
I. Watercolour 540 1985, 17 x 25 cm, Watercolour
II. Watercolour 523, 1985, 16 x 12 cm, Watercolour & graphite
III. Watercolour 17, 1972, 20 x 30 cm, Watercolour
IV. Watercolour 132, 1973, 18 x 35 cm, Watercolour
I
II
III
IV
I. Watercolour 178, 1973, 17 x 22 cm, Watercolour
II. Watercolour 240, 1974, 10 x 13 cm, Watercolour
III. Sun Dog Blues II, 1976, 51 x 61 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 746)
IV. Watercolour 83, 1972, 28 x 39 cm, Watercolour
15
Storm Near Knoydart, 1974, 183 x 201 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 547)
16
The Sound of Sleat: Red in a Summer Night IX, 1970, 191 x 201 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 13)
17
Shadow in a Blue Sky, 1972, 160 x 178 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 219)
18
Watercolour 549, 1985, 12 x 10 cm, Watercolour & graphite
19
20
I
II
III
IV
I. Mars Violet Blues II, 1976, 51 x 61 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 715)
II. Watercolour 515, 1985, 17 x 25 cm, Watercolour
III. Watercolour 67-13, 1967, 33 x 32cm, Watercolour
IV. Watercolour 70-50, 1970, 14 x 17 cm, Watercolour
Drawing 51-1, 1951, 55 x 38 cm, Brush & ink
21
Drawing 71-4, 1951, 22 x 27 cm, Charcoal
22
Drawing 544, 1985, 8 x 13 cm, Graphite
23
24
I
II
III
IV
I. Drawing 586, 1986, 6 x 26 cm, Graphite
II. Drawing 559, 1985, 12 x 30 cm, Graphite
III. Drawing 639, 1986, 16 x 14 cm, Graphite
IV. Watercolour 70-50, 1970, 14 x 17 cm, Watercolour
Drawing 71-3, 1971, 22 x 27 cm, Charcoal
25
Watercolour 579, 1986, 14 x 26 cm, Watercolour & graphite
26
Watercolour 67-10, 1967, 27 x 38 cm, Watercolour
27
Light, Skye and Sea, 1974, 61 x 76 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 522)
28
II
I
III
I. Red Sun I, 1971, 30 x 36 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 156)
II. Reflection on Sleat, 1973, 61 x 76 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 362)
III. Watercolour 130, 1973, 20 x 26 cm, Watercolour
29
Red Sky Over the Sound of Sleat XIII, 1972, 183 x 201 cm, Oil on canvas (o/c 222)
30
I
II
I. Watercolour 55, 1971-1972, 23 x 34 cm, Watercolour
II. Watercolour 177, 1973, 9 x 14 cm, Watercolour
31
1977, Jon Schueler painting in his studio in Romasaig, Mallaig, Scotland. Photo: Archie I. McLellan.
resipole
studios
FINE
ART
GALLERY
ISBN 978-0-9569402-1-6
www.resipolestudios.co.uk
loch sunart • acharacle • argyll • scotland • ph36 4hx
find us on social media • tel: 01967 431506
A portion of the profits from this exhibition will go to support the work of Room13 International.
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