Ward Schumaker
Jack Fischer Gallery /
San Francisco
November 5,
2013
The buzz around San Francisco’s new
art hub—near the Design District along a stretch of Utah Street and nearby
Potrero—resonates throughout Jack Fischer’s expansive new space. Its inaugural
exhibition, “Years of Pretty,” is a mini-retrospective of SF-based Ward
Schumaker’s work from the past 10 years.
Schumaker’s day job for 35 years has
been commercial illustration for clients like Hermès and Kronenbourg. While his
hand is finely trained, in his fine artwork he chooses to let other energies
come into play. Roughly brushed, intuitively composed paintings mix randomness
and design, the skillfulness of the hand revealing itself slyly in the flip of
a brushstroke—the blunt, ragged dragging of paint which obliterates text just
so.
While Schumaker presents his
gestural musings in a variety of formats, it is the presence of seven hand-painted
books that carry the most weight. The hefty books on Stonehenge paper mesh
expressionistic paint-handling with washy fields, at times disrupted by
stenciled text. Beneath Krakatoa (2004) offers dense black passages enlivened
by brush tracks or faint gestural figurative suggestions in hues of pink or
red, the rich, energetically composed fields in effect constituting a thick
stack of paintings packed back-to-back between bindings.
It was in a class at the San
Francisco Center for the Book where the artist first experimented with mixing
bookbinding paste into acrylic paint. The resulting pages caught the eye of a
gallerist from Shanghai, who offered to show them as paintings. The work has
since drawn attention from many in the art world—finding its way into the
collections of Eric Fischl and Ivan Karp, among others. Schumaker enjoys the
hard, tactile quality and glossy sheen that the medium lends to the work,
stating that it adds an element of uncertainty, which he enjoys.
Elixir Refused (Make Happy) (2005)
draws narrative from the Bhagavad Gita, while Weather Patterns (2003) offers
atmospheric fields of apricot and pale aqua broken by quirky biomorphic forms.
As one becomes immersed in Schumaker’s images, it’s almost a process of getting
to know how he thinks. Certainly for those with a painterly orientation the
work compels prolonged viewing, soaking in the impressions of form and color
both as visual nourishment and as a challenge to decipher technique and
meaning.
Rounding out the exhibition are
large and small wall-mounted works along with his “dumb boxes,” an assortment
of sculptural objects combining geometric forms, cubes, rectangles and sloping
planes, with roughly applied geometric designs. One-Eyed Afternoon (2012)
features a pair of cubes, 7” on a side, joined across the bottom by a plane on
which they both rest. Roughly brushed with white gesso, the interior spaces are
tightly filled with squares of corrugated cardboard.
While elusive snippets of text
throughout intrigue and tease, some, such as the repeated phrase “I Am Big
Heaven,” clearly demand attention. Schumaker maintains an active meditation
practice, and one might reasonably conjecture that these words are offered as a
form of mantra for both artist and viewer to latch on to—if only in order to
let go.
Barbara Morris
