Object Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Schooley, Elmer |
Title |
SHEEP COUNTRY |
Date |
1983-1986 |
Medium |
oil on canvas |
Culture |
American |
Object ID |
1991.211 |
Collection |
Contemporary Art (1970-present) |
Object Name |
Painting |
Credit line |
Virginia Johnson Fund |
Didactic Information |
Sheep Country, 1983-1986 after a landscape by Elmer Schooley I don't want to be the sheepherder. I want to be the little, fat, blimp like a tick on a dog surrounded and safe a purple dot on the television screen absorbed into the world pebble sprawling a driveway stubble on a chin, sharp and itchy so simple so pain free Elisabeth Lakavage April 2015: New Mexico printmaker and painter Elmer Schooley is known for large-scale paintings filled with meticulous, exacting details built up with layers of paint using brushes, palette knives, sponges, and pieces of found and worked metal. He created such large works with the assistance of a rolling platform and a series of pulleys and weights to raise the canvases to different levels as he completed various sections of the compositions. Owing a debt to the shimmering Pointalism of Georges Seurat, the scale and abstraction of Eduard Monet, and the harmonious tonalities and concern with surface of Pierre Bonnard, Schooley painted great expanses of the land while narrowing details down to an intimate level. He worked without preliminary drawings and treated all the elements of his compositions equally, without a primary focal point or framing elements. Considering himself to be a "maximalist" because of the intricacy of his brushstrokes and organizational patterning found in nature, Schooley painted his landscapes devoid of horizon lines in order to concentrate on the nuances of the land itself. This painting is part of a larger body of work knowns as the "Wilderness Series," a departure from Schooley's earlier representational works. He taught at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico between the 1940s and the late 1960s, and retired in 1977. In 1986, he received a Governor's Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts, which established him as an important artist in the Southwest. Schooley's works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Dallas Art Museum, among others. |