In the Absence of Color
Bobbie Allen
Coastline Pilot, Laguna Beach, CA
March 2006
All color-field painters since Mark Rothko run the risk of being called derivative. So they must find a different kind of inspiration, their own way of voicing the transcendent qualities of color. Paula Schoen is a color-field painter who expresses color through abstract, minimalist landscapes. Her canvases nearly always contain a horizon line of some sort. That is usually where the representation ends: The saturated colors may allude to dawn or dusk, but they are glossier and more intense (sometimes even fluorescent). This gives her work a flatness that is characteristic of modern color fields.
I found Schoen’s latest show at Marion Meyer Contemporary Art (354 N. Coast Highway) shocking because of what is absent: color. Schoen has created a series of canvases working almost exclusively in black and white. The show is titled, “Carbon and Stardust: The Other Side of Color.” It is intelligent, skillful, and not to be missed.
Ansel Adams, the master of black and white photography, once grumbled, “If I wanted color, I’d paint.” We appreciate Adams’ work because of his skill with range and contrast. The whites are pure, the blacks are deep, and any given shot contains all the shades of gray in between. To do this with paint goes to the very heart of what makes working in oil so difficult. White is the most challenging color in the artist’s palette, rivaled perhaps only by black. Artists create the illusion of light with white. Think about what this means for a moment: To paint light means to create the illusion that light is emanating from a canvas, rather than striking on it. It is with black that artists create the illusion of depth. Light, contrasted with dark, gives the eye dimensional wisdom. Technically, this is simple lightness or darkness of any given color (called value), but exact execution of black and white makes a painting look three-dimensional. Masters of chiaroscuro - the finesse of light and shade in painting – are admired for their ability to create a sense of space in their work. The Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio is a chiaroscurist. Schoen, in choosing to work monochromatically, has given new depth to her landscapes. To subtitle her show “The other side of color,” shows her awareness of this.
The canvases vary in mood. “Natural Treasure” (oil on canvas, like all of Schoen’s work) could be an imaginary coastline or a fog-covered mountaintop. It could be sunrise, or sunset. This is irrelevant. What you perceive are white whites and black blacks, with only the range of light in between to trace our landscape’s features. It seems immense. There is lots of glazing (thinning the paint with a medium, some of it so new it seems barely dry), but the paint is sometimes very thin on the canvas, sometimes more layered. The effect is one of depth, and of peace.
“The Wave,” a triptych, will lure you in with an eerie sense of power. This is a masterful painting. It is highly glazed – hardly a brush stroke to be found. The deepest of blacks depict impossible shadows on the face of a translucent gray sea swell. The mystery of the source of light is mesmerizing. It seems impossible, but to the dynamic range of black and white, Schoen has added a sense of movement.
Other, smaller canvases retain the same sense of vastness. “Long Memory” is really a study in blacks. The white streak of cloudline is the merest suggestion of white, clearly blended on the canvas until the artist restrained her hand and allowed only a sliver of white to remain.
There is some color. “As the Crow Flies” uses sienna to suggest a storm cloud that has overtaken most of the sky. The diptych “Gathering of the Four Winds” uses blue in the sky with such a light hand you seem to imagine it. But these canvases are not as impressive as the utter lack of color in others. There is a sense of boiling the landscape down to its most illusive qualities: its lines, or, more often, its lack of lines, the absence of distinction, the moment when light gives way to dark, or dark gives way to light.
Petites Rêveries
Richard Chang
ARTnews, October 2005
Paula Schoen proves that you don't have to go colossal to convey epic themes. On view here was her recent "Petites Rêveries" series, 24 squarish, oil-on-canvas abstract paintings that usually didn't exceed a foot in width or height, yet captured nature at its most dramatic. Sunrises, sunsets, and ocean horizons are illustrated in vibrant shades and layers of blue, red, orange, and green. The Banning, California, artist appears to have metaphysics in mind, too, as she and others describe her creations as "dreamscapes" or "psychic weather".
Schoen evokes the color-field work of Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, as well as the outdoor abstraction of Richard Diebenkorn. Her lines are alternately hard-edged and soft, and her moods shift from fiery to serene. Bathed in soothing green, The Promised Land (2005) could have been a Middle Eastern desert or dry lake bed. Neptune's Playground (2005) brings to life a thriving imaginary sea world rich in tones of aqua, azure, and indigo. Resurrection (2005) resembles a Navajo rug with its red, blue, and yellow pattern and frayed edge against black.
Some bold titles (Dream Surge, Twilight Trance) border on New Age, but Schoen’s images are not fluff, they are moving and crystalline. She is clearly celebrating Mother Nature, and it is hard for the viewer to resist her paeans.
The details and brushstrokes in each reverie are painstaking, yet Schoen's small dreams can be enjoyed from afar. With such limitations of scale, there is hardly room for error, but combining discipline and inspiration, Schoen succeeded in this exercise.
Prelude to Light
Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
NIKE: New Art in Europe, Issue # 62, 2001
Munich, Germany
The glorification of the act of painting itself, always a primary concern of abstract expressionism, finds up-to-the-minute guise in the work of Paula Schoen, whose striking paintings carry forward the stylistically diverse late modernist tradition of Hofmann, Rothko and Motherwell.
Schoen’s compositions are not so much abstract metaphors for observed phenomena as visual analogs for inner states of being. Primarily non-representational, her color field canvases contain images of objects and figures that are subtly suggested. More felt than seen, semi-organic and natural forces inhabit landscapes that exist somewhere between an outer reality and a purely subjective state.
These emotionally charged paintings, which filter and interpret reality rather than describe it, express a skepticism about the credibility of the visible world and take their cues from an unpredictable inner meteorology of color and the axioms and corollaries of an intuitive mathematics of line. Large open expanses, divided into sumptuous compartments of intense color, convey the music, alternately violent and quiescent, of this psychic weather.
Through images that faintly suggest meetings of land and water, or mountains and sky, Schoen creates an infrastructure of thresholds and transitions in a sensitive terrain, where the edges of nervous linear fragments or jigsawn segments of the picture plane suddenly reveal glimpses of secret places, and charge the viewer with tension, expectation and discovery.
Schoen’s surfaces range from serene and ethereal to stormy and blaring, and involve dramatic textural effects achieved by contrasting translucent washes and glazes with heavy impastos and by liberally incising, scraping and scumbling. Surface paint and undercoats, brushstrokes and knifework are plainly revealed, and accidents which may occur during the painting process are appropriated and sublimated into the whole.
Schoen underscores an awareness of man’s intimate connection with nature, and highlights those points or moments at which the internal and external meet. Titles of paintings such as Offering at the Crossroads, Edge of Time, Passageway and Prelude to Light allude to these points of connection between light and darkness, here and there, and stasis and movement. Reflecting what she has referred to as a state of “spiritual agitation”, Schoen’s Laughter of the Gods, The Wanderer’s Dream, Voyage and The Silent Promise speak of the soul’s journey as a confrontation with the mystery of existence.
While her work transmits powerful metaphysical overtones, Schoen is dedicated to the sheer physicality of the act of painting, a believer in the idea of the artist as a vital and immediate instrument of direct expression, and a willing agent of an impossible passion for defining the indefinable and capturing what she calls the “terrible beauty” of an aesthetic Absolute.
Echos of Light and Darkness
Lauri Mendenhall
Coast Magazine, October 2001
In her current series of intensely colored paintings at Marion Meyer Contemporary Art in Laguna Beach, Paula Schoen redefines what are potentially traditional landscapes into passionate dreamscapes charged with etheral emotion and powerful metaphysics.
Her use of layered ribbons of paint wedged between saturated fields of light and darkness suggest a force beyond one’s usual sense of natural “grounding” or sight orientation. Moreover, Schoen leaves in doubt whether they are sky, mountain, or ocean, preferring to convey a place that exists somewhere between a physical reality that is stable, and a consciousness of frequent change, vulnerability, and the transient nature of contemporary life.
Schoen’s paintings are not only beautiful to look at, but with titles such as “The Timeless Wave” and “Transition: Night to Day”, they act as abstract metaphors for that state of eerie limbo where unpredicatable life events place us. Consider how one’s clear-cut daily routine is suddenly blurred into an undefined path of spiritual intuition and empathy after witnessing the recent American tragedy that will forever redefine our fragile lives. All we can ever know for sure is that nothing is certain except the horizon in our hearts.