watercolour on paper, initialled and dated '85, titled label verso
mounted, framed and under glass

Provenance: Label verso: The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh The Woman in the Sky Exhibition January 1991 Cat no.51 and illustrated in colour on the back cover of the exhibition catalogue; The Scottish Gallery stock number: GCOSO3313; Jon Schueler catalogue ref: 357
Note: Jon Schueler (September 12, 1916 – August 5, 1992), Painter, teacher and writer, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, America, son of a comfortably-off tyre manufacturer. He graduated in English at University of Wisconsin, 1938, gaining his master’s, 1940, but plans to be a writer were delayed when he joined the Air Corps of the American Army in 1941. He served as a navigator, but was discharged due to combat fatigue in 1944, then began writing. In 1945, when his first wife, Jane Elton, signed for portrait-painting classes, Schueler joined her; from 1947–51 he attended the California School of Fine Arts, taught by Clyfford Still, the abstract painter, who introduced Schueler to the work of J M W Turner. In 1951 Schueler moved to New York, where he encountered leading Abstract Expressionists and was signed up by the dealer Leo Castelli, who gave him a first show in 1957. Inspired by the 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going, and in search of a landscape, in 1957 Schueler left his second wife, Joellen (Jody) Hall, travelled to the west coast of Scotland and discovered Mallaig, where he was to establish a studio at The Old Schoolhouse, Romasaig. He worked prolifically, oils and watercolours drawing on the local environment but close to abstraction. Schueler returned to Scotland periodically from America over the years, exhibiting there, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, in 1984. He taught at Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute and University of Illinois. Schueler was married, often tempestuously, five times, his last wife, the art historian Magda Salvesen, editing his extensive memoirs after his death following Parkinson’s Disease. They were published in 2000 as The Sound of Sleat and coincided with a show at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, with another in 2002. There was another exhibition at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, in 2003 . His work is included in international collections such as the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra). In 1975 Whitney Museum of American Art director John I. H. Baur described Schueler's distinctive style: "We see his paintings one minute as clouds and sea and islands, the next as swirling arrangements of pure color and light. And they shift back and forth in our vision from one pole to the other, amassing richness from both." In 2006, at the time of solo exhibitions of his work in Edinburgh and New York, art reviewer Janet McKenzie wrote of "his remarkable commitment and development as a mature painter, abstract, yet inspired by natural phenomena." Schueler himself wrote: "When I speak of nature, I’m speaking of the sky, because in many ways the sky became nature to me. And when I think of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig. Jon Schueler's work is held in the collections of more than sixty public museums and galleries in the US and UK. At the time of writing, his "Storm at Sea Remembered" is a centrepiece of the public exhibition "A Weather Eye" at The McManus (Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum). More information available at jonschueler.com .