Arts
By David Maddox
"Grace: Paintings by Ward Schumaker"
One would expect to find a fundamental difference between an illustrator and other visual artists. Sure, illustrators have nuance in their work, but at the end of the day they need to convey information and cannot indulge in pure puzzle- and enigma-making.
Ward Schumaker, a Bay Area artist currently displaying work at Zeitgeist, has enjoyed a long, successful career as an illustrator. He started as a painter, but put it aside for almost 40 years after his senior year at Omaha University, when a work he made won first prize in the Nebraska Governor's Art Show, but was deemed obscene by a viewer, forcing him to withdraw it under pressure. Schumaker only returned to painting in the last few years, in large part through shows at Zeitgeist. His work in this current show makes no mystery of its intent to communicate spiritual ideas and experience. The pieces border on bluntness, with messages printed in block letters, but the painterly qualities move them well past the level of advertising.
You can enter this body of work with three abstract paintings on black paper inspired by the abstract painter Marc Rothko. Much of Rothko's power lay in his use of intense color and simple massings to create icons with an abstract spiritual content. Schumaker echoes Rothko's rectangular forms, although his compositions have more symmetry and the forms crowd the margins of the frame less. Also, Schumaker draws on a palette heavy with grays, making his paintings something more like a description of Rothko than a re-creation. They point toward the older painter as a precursor in using paint to carry spiritual meaning.
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"Grace" Redefined: Ward Schumaker's pieces state a direct message, which has a Buddhist sense with its reference to the world of illusions and the call to stillness.
At the core of the show are several cloth-bound books and a series of canvases that repeat a phrase or pair of phrases. The book "No Matter" sets the phrases "God is all" and "There is no world" on alternating pages. Schumaker prints the words in a block-print face that he covers with paint, obscuring the text to varying degrees. "Believe(r)" repeats the phrase, "Everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked," on each page. This piece has more color, a red that asserts at different levels of intensity. He covers the words with paint and highlights them, making the words a frame and drawing attention to their qualities as freestanding marks distinct from their duty as indicators of phonetic values.
The pieces state a direct message, which has a Buddhist sense with its reference to the world as illusion and the call to stillness. His annunciation of spiritual principles would devolve into inspirational exhortations were it not for the paint and design. Schumaker's mostly gray palette and tendency to echo the text with a more obscure double create a floating world of abstract, aqueous space where the words as objects elude firm grasp but gain visual life as marks coming loose from spatial mooring. The visual qualities draw you into a pictorial environment where the spectral quality of experience can be felt.
The earnest spiritual efforts in this exhibit raise some interesting considerations of how place matters in visual art. Shown in the Bay Area, these pieces would fall in with a body of well-behaved non-Christian spiritual practice. Transport it into Nashville and give it the title "Grace," and now you see it in a context colored by a prevailing Christianity. In a town filled with virtuosos of Christian cultural interpretation, one can look for connections between Schumaker's work and Christianity's discourse on grace, the freely given gift of salvation and triumph over death. The artist shows a vision of grace as a state that people themselves are sufficient to achieve; it does not appear to depend on Christianity and the figure of Jesus. In a different context, one might take that for granted. Here, "Grace" comes out with a multiplicity of meanings.
In a land filled with people dedicated to "The Book," Schumaker shows us an odd sort of book, each consisting of a story with one phrase. But that should make sense to people for whom all literature can point to one word: Jesus. This reductionist potential in Christian language points to an interpretive path for Schumaker's books. You could see them as portfolios of paintings, but I think they function more as books to be read, and as a comment on books: spend enough time with a book, and it will boil down to a single idea that fills every page, carried within every twist of the plot, every inch of dialogue. Schumaker takes you there directly. One book lays out two yoked ideas: "God is all" and "there is no world." Divinity pervades the world and is its only true substance. There is no need to add or vary the words, although Schumaker could have written a story to build up the point gradually. The fluid, shifting densities of paint elaborate the idea as much as needed. His compositions are not as simple as our hypothetical one-word holy book, but any spiritual practice asks for focus, and Schumaker pursues focus in these paintings.
Schumaker's show takes up the front part of Zeitgeist's gallery. The back half consists of a photography show featuring the work of three artists. The most striking of these are Trent Boysen's pictures of seed pods, viewed up close in symmetrical segments on a dark background. They have a sepia color that gives them the appearance of old scientific samples. The presentation, details and titling bring out something mysterious in everyday organic debris. "Stegopod" shows a thorny semicircle with some sort of chamber inside. It seems very exotic, but it's just a hickory burr. Boysen makes these images by taking direct scans of the objects on a flatbed scanner in a dark room. It is hard to know if the dark, syrupy color comes from this technique or from subsequent decisions in handling the digital image or choosing paper and ink.
Scott Bonner draws attention to the digital nature of his photography by giving his images of landscapes and skyscapes titles that end with a .tif filename extension. He has given the sky in some of the pictures notably artificial color schemes, but the most successful pieces are traditional black-and-white pictures of thunderclouds. They fill up the large image frame in a diffuse way, as clouds do when you approach them at the moment they burst into rain.
Cécile Moreau creates multiple-exposure images that combine streetscapes of Paris and Nashville with photos of paintings. She enlarges the images to the point of graininess, and indistinctness characterizes the works, ultimately to their detriment. The underlying elements are difficult to read, and the combinations of shapes do not have strong features as abstract design.
All three of these photographers make it perfectly clear that they work in what has become an inherently digital medium, even when they use it to make images that fall within several well-established photographic traditions. By contrast, although Schumaker's work is equally rooted in traditions (Abstract Expressionism and its immediate heirs), it could not be more handmade and analog.