Emil SchumacherEmil Schumacher's new paintings are so thick with paint and the surfaces so encrusted with gritty effects that they become almost sculptural. Mixing his own powdered pigments to a grainy roughness and applying industrial paints that are smooth and shiny or globbed up into prehistoric tar pit impasto, adding, in one piece, newspaper and in another, two gloves, he creates a tough exterior. They have the effect of seeing into the molten core way below the earth's surface. Continuing from a geologic framework, each work is a passionate exploration of earth's materials. He interacts with the materials to fashion a mutual arrangement between source and sorcery (art). The rough, earthy surface becomes a layer onto which he mutably imposes his sense of order and involvement, his personal process. The works aren't merely a slice of details from an impassioned working. They are compositions that, each singularly, are the captured instance of a moment's particular fury. The compositions are as solid as concrete. Layers and layers of activity—besmirched brushstrokes, scraped paint, splatters, fields blending into misted atmospheres, and his drawn line so charged with the power of expressive movement—show through each other to render all right on the surface in our field of vision. Depth and illusion are peripheral enticements. Though he's working mostly in the colors of geology—browns, black, tans and molten red—sparks of contrasting color burst through occasionally to augment, embellish, excite and make more sense. Whispers of blue, magenta, gold and orange on a mostly brown and olive green surface are like breaths of life emerging from rock. I had the great pleasure of meeting the artist and his wife, Ulla, both very charming, both vibrant and excited about being in New York City for a few days, and the three of us were able to have a quick exact exchange. Ulla would sometimes amicably help her husband enunciate the thought. They said: "Each picture is an individual. I don't make series. It's always a fight to win the picture. I have to work very hard. I try every time to make a new picture from the world, from nature. Every day we go for walks, to see nature, to be in contact with nature. The paintings are not speculative. In nature I see color, balance and adventure. I make the paintings between feeling and intellect . . . I make a line with my whole body so there's more expression than if it was with just my hand . . . My studio looks like a battlefield . . ." This comes from a man who had his first success in the '50s, went on to win awards and have work selected for dozens of museums and collections all over the world, inspired a generation of younger painters, regrettably hasn't had a show in NYC since 1968, and is now, at 74, producing the strongest work of his already distinguished and lasting career. (Arts, May 1986) |