The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life [Hardcover]

Jon Schueler (Author), Magda Salvesen (Editor), Diane Cousineau (Editor), Russell Banks (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1999

The remarkable autobiography of an American artist's dreams, passions, and work

As an American abstract expressionist painter and early protege of Leo Castelli, Jon Schueler lived and worked among the country's most gifted artists: Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Jasper Johns, and many others. Schueler was mysteriously driven to connect nature with a deeply personal passion. In the late 1950s, he travelled for the first time to Mallaig, a town in western Scotland on the Sound of Sleat, where the dramatic landscape inspired his art and continued to influence him throughout his career.

Over nearly thirty years, as he painted, Schueler worked on this book. In it, he struggled to define what it was that compelled him to paint and wrestled with a conflict that confronts all artists--how to strike a balance between the need to create in solitude and the desire for human intimacy. The Sound of Sleat tells the story of a passionate life and offers a fascinating look at the New York art world in the latter half of this century and an astonishing window on art, hope, despair, and creativity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's hard to decide which aspect of painter Jon Schueler's painfully candid memoir is more fascinating: the unsparing depictions of his tormented relationships with women, or the nuts-and-bolts details of the art trade's byzantine financial dealings. In both cases, Schueler (1916-92) never minces words, nor does he let himself off the hook, since his unusual book includes the perspectives of lovers, collectors, and art dealers (via their letters to him) as well as his own (through correspondence and journal entries from 1957 through 1979). The painter is reticent concerning his aesthetic preoccupations, though the few words he writes about his feelings for nature, especially the wild coastline on Scotland's Sound of Sleat, are fervent and lucid. It's easy to see how Schueler came to be married five times and divorced four: his letters to women are seductively passionate, yet brutally honest about the fact that his first commitment will always be to his work. Color reproductions suggest that his art has been too glibly pigeonholed as "second-generation abstract expressionist," when in fact it has a luminous quality that transcends categorization. Leo Castelli and Willem de Kooning are among the many notables who make appearances, but this is one art-world memoir that doesn't rely on name-dropping for its punch. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

The life of Abstract Expressionist painter Schueler (1917-1992) defies the artistic cliche of divine talent undone by self-destructive passions. This collection of journal entries and correspondence covering more than 20 years of his life presents a hardworking man who made many sacrifices for his art but found only limited success. The book begins with Schueler's first journey in 1957 from his Manhattan home to the Scottish Highlands and ends with his relative obscurity in the late 1970s. In subsequent years, while discovering in the Highland landscape the theme and aesthetic reflected in his paintings for the rest of his career, Schueler struggled to maintain contact with New York City's gallery scene (his first dealer was the influential Leo Castelli), with his American contemporaries (such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler), with the new wife he'd left in the States and with his children from his first marriage. As the artist moves between New York and Scotland in the years that follow, his loneliness and sexual frustration are a consistent motif, as is his single-minded drive to paint and its destructive effects on all his relationships with a succession of women. Throughout, Schueler has trouble balancing artistic focus and personal happiness. As he grew older, he acknowledged (grudgingly) that fame had passed him by. He had to swallow his pride and lower prices in order to sell his work?but his art lost none of its urgency. Assembled posthumously by the editors (Salvesen is his widow; Cousineau, a professor of literature), this book is particularly apropos in light of the recent critical rediscovery of Schueler, upcoming exhibits and monographs. It offers a refreshing, realistic depiction of an American artist toiling away outside the fashionable heart of the art world. 32 b&w photos; 16 color plates (not seen by PW). With a foreword by Russell Banks.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (January 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312200153
• ISBN-13: 978-0312200152
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,381,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Significant Marks of an Artist's Hand !, June 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life (Hardcover)

This beautifully crafted book folds back time and space to reveal the mind of the artist. The editors have set out to create a remarkable empathy with Jon Schueler - the wartime hero, the struggling artist and the lover of Nature. This trinitarian perspective is full of colour as revealed in the passages of intense personal correspondence and the additional more reflective text at his own hand. There is a frankness and honesty about the writing which is compelling for the reader. In weaving this complex tapestry of an artist's life, the editors have subtly exposed the constant searching and often desperate frustrations of his early years before the canvas. There is much to say about his main sources of inspiration particularly his 'women in the sky'.

In more than one sense Jon Schueler found himself and his vocation on his first working visit to Mallaig - the small fishing village on the west coast of Scotland which later became a central part of his existence. Here he encountered Nature in all its diversity and strengths. He experienced the changing state of the sea and sky - the lost horizon of so much of his painting. He went out with the local fishermen and encountered the rawness and savagery of hostile waves whipped to a frenzy by the Atlantic gales howling through the Minch and across the islands of the Inner Hebrides. He walked in the snow clouds and driving rain sweeping across the rocky headlands, retained these images deep inside and then returned to his studio to confront the ultimate reality of the artist - the blank canvas stretched and primed ready to receive significant, vibrant and urgent brushmarks. Drawing on his visual memory of 'sea dogs', the revelation of a summer's night above the Sound of Sleat and his provocative female muses, Jon Schueler succeeded over many years in creating paintings without edges. These are powerful and complex structures which reach into the depths of your soul, unearth the archetypes and scratch at the unconscious mind. These paintings are Jungian in the truest sense and illustrate Jon Schueler's personal journey through many turbulent relationships with women and other artists. This was an artist who did not spare himself any of life's vicissitudes - they were his burden, his trial, his cross and his release.

In the final analysis the book itself is a remarkable achievement and deserves to be read widely by those who examine the achievements of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. This group should not be sub-divided into early or late contributors as they were all drawing on the same well for their inspiration - a hopeful world being reborn in the tragic aftermath of the World Wars of this century. It is often said that these artists took painting to the limit - even to the extremity - of free form and the deconstruction of figurative line. While all of this is probably true, they have left behind a truly astonishing series of images which constantly remind us of our own responsibility towards Nature and of our own mortality. These pictures convey us forward into the future with a message to our grandchildren and their grandchildren that this solitary planet earth deserves our vigilant care and respect.

The artist, often suprisingly, can remain in touch with the capacity of science, engineering and technology to restore our faith in the future. At the same time he or she acknowledges the struggle for survival in difficult and troubled times across a frequently war-torn world. The artist will never have a comfortable life in this regard as Jon Schueler's marks on paper serve to remind us. But Art like Science is a belief system that goes to the centre of our being. It is a spiritual path. Jon Schueler was my friend and I shall continue to respect him for his courage and determination - and his willingness to underpin his artistic expression with thoughts, words and deeds which reflect his generosity of spirit. This was an artist worthy of his generation!

The book is about the dignity and freedom of artistic expression and deserves to be read by all those who claim a knowledge of the history of painting in the 20th century.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of an Artist on Quest of Self-Discovery, February 26, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life (Hardcover)

This is a tour-de-force of the creative process by a man as he casts a cold, critical eye on his own struggles. The honesty of this musician, painter and writer regarding himself, his relationships and his quest braces you like the wind of Scotland. His 'sense of place' regarding the Sound of Sleat rivals that of the poet W.B. Yeats.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sound of Sleat, August 17, 2000

By 

Jim Wang (Holmdel, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life (Hardcover)

A beautiful book. I am reading this book while I am teaching myself oil painting, in an abstract way. Although I do not have a chance to see the sky of the Sound of Sleat, I can feel the beauty of it through the book. This book tells everything about being a painter. At the end, nothing matters except the love of painting. This is the book should be read by anyone who wants to be a painter, or just to paint.