To the North: Paintings by Jon Schueler
City Art Centre until 27 September 2003

It is impossible to describe the work of American painter Jon Schueler without coming over all poetic. A writer at first, Schueler turned to painting in 1949 when New York was sizzling with Abstract Expressionist zeal. His work of the 50s shows the distinct influence of Clyfford Still, Schueler’s teacher, and it wasn’t until the artist’s first visit to the Scottish fishing village of Mallaig in 1957 that he really grasped his raison d’être – to capture the essence of the west coast’s ever shifting skies.

The rest of Schueler’s life was spent pursuing his unique vision of nature with a style which owed as much to the luminous atmospherics of JMW Turner as it did to Still’s heavily impastoed colour feasts and the more muted colour-field paintings of Mark Rothko. The artist made his home both in New York and in Mallaig, spending time also with Richard Demarco and at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh.

The City Art Centre (along with Richard Ingleby) successfully presents this progression in Schueler’s work over two chronologically arranged floors, starting with the visceral canvasses of the early to mid 50s, such as Transition II (1956-7), where entirely abstract primary colours squirm and writhe across the entire plane, recalling Pollock and perhaps also hinting at Schueler’s involvement in New York’s jazz scene.

The intensity of colour, gesture and texture in Schueler’s early work is an assault on the senses, but by 1958 he had given up his lusty palette knife for increasingly delicate, thinly-brushed tones, an early example of which is A Yellow Sun (1958). The burning yellow mass dominates the 2-metre canvas, bounded by pink and pastel blue cloudy forms, and the hint of a horizon – suggested by no more than a burnt orange horizontal band along the bottom – anchors the painting in the real world.

A series of small canvasses entitled Sleat Veil (1969) go one step further, taking the forms, light and colour of the Skye landscape and condensing them into near-geometrical shapes, softly washed in pastel shades without the gestural brush-strokes that had gone before. The effect is ethereal, and would in isolation appear completely abstract, were it not for the fact that they are closely related in composition to A Yellow Sun.

Upstairs is the artist’s work of the 70s and 80s, which falls loosely into two sorts: wildly intense, impastoed paintings dealing with abstract themes, and muted, contemplative, carefully delineated landscapes. It is striking how form takes precedence over colour in many of the latter; black was all the rage in late 60s New York, and perhaps in seeking the ultimate essence of his idea, Schueler found that even colour could be tamed.

The Sound of Sleat: June Night, XI reduces all the elements of nature to grey, horizontal fields streaking across the canvas, offering just enough information to suggest a moonlit seascape. December Gale: Sun Leaving (1974) is almost a narrative, where the last light of the day clings keenly to a wisp of night time cloud, the sky closing in from above as well as from below. The title tells us who will win this tensely-fought battle, which is a beautifully captured moment from the ever-changing drama of the Highland skies.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.07.03