Night Sky, July, II (o/c 148)

Artist Jon Schueler (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, 1916 - 1992)

Date1971

Mediumoil on canvas

ClassificationsPaintings And Drawings

DimensionsFrame Size: 128.5 × 153.8 × 4.8cm
Sight Size: 127 × 152.5cm

AcquisitionPresented in 2014 by the Jon Schueler Estate.

LocationOn Display - Gallery 17

Object numberABDAG017806

About MeThe sky is the ultimate metaphor for mood and memory in Jon Schueler’s paintings, and it became the painter’s main motif. He explained that ‘The sky gave me the freedom to respond. It changes, shifts, moves, there is no form it cannot become: there is no change that cannot take place. Each moment is its own. It mirrors life’s infinite change, infinite variety, infinite possibility.’

The influence of his Abstract Expressionist teachers and contemporaries, particularly Clyfford Still, is visible in Schueler’s work, but so is the legacy of J.M.W. Turner. Schueler’s painting blurs the boundary between realism and abstraction. After twenty years on the New York art scene, Schueler went to live and work in Mallaig in the Scottish Highlands between 1970 and 1975. He frequently returned there throughout his life. He declared that ‘sky has become all of nature to me’, and Scotland’s atmospheric and ever-changing skies reflected what became his leading artistic principle.

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“[The sky] changes, shifts, moves, there is no form it cannot become: there is no change that cannot take place. Each moment is its own. It mirrors life’s infinite change, infinite variety, infinite possibility.” Jon Schueler.

Exhibitions

Gallery 17 - Abstract Art