Overview

The Sound of Sleat is an intensely personal record of the forces and events that shaped Jon Schueler (1916-1992) as an artist. At the same time, it evokes with great resonance the various cultural, historical and geographical contexts that informed his life: from pre-war Midwestern America to the Western Highlands of Scotland where, from his studio, he could look across the Sound of Sleat to Skye and the other islands of the Inner Hebrides, a vista that allowed him to strike the delicate balance between the observation of nature and abstract forms, which is the mystery and power of Schueler's paintings. The book recounts his dramatic childhood in Milwaukee and traumatic war years in Britain as a B17 navigator; his decision to study painting with Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine Arts; his arrival in New York in 1951 and his introduction to Rothko, Newman and Kline; his turbulent experiences with marriages and women; money and the lack of it; and the tremendous need to return continually to Scotland where he found in the Sound of Sleat the images essential to his painting.The reader in drawn in through the immediacy of the journal entries; the quality of his longer reflections on memory, the past, and the act of painting; and the evocative power of his descriptions of the sea and the sky. Equally compelling are the extraordinary series of letters to lovers and art dealers (Leo Castelli, Ben Heller) that reveal the verve and intelligence with which Schueler engages others through language and the depth of his engagement. What is perhaps most striking throughout is the urgency to tell the story, to search out a truth that is always difficult, often painful, and sometimes damning in its evidence of failure.Although Schueler was first and foremost an artist, he devoted himself to his writing with the same passion, sense of struggle and drive towards experimentation that he brought to his painting. Rather than beginning in childhood and then proceeding onwards in a conventional way, the book's chronology is based on the moment of writing, so events may be presented once, or they may be divulged piecemeal as the years go by. This technique adds an element of suspense to the narrative-- as in his efforts to come to terms with his almost unbearable air force experiences, his search for a woman loved during World War II, and his attempt to discover the mother who died just after he was born.What continuously lures the reader on is both the unusual glimpses of the intricate maneuverings of the art scene and the fascinating figure of Schueler himself. Ironic and irreverent, alternately acerbic and lyrical, deeply spiritual and unabashedly erotic, he offers us both humor and moments of revealing psychological insight.

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Reviews

"The Atlantic Monthly, May 1999, page 130. Review by Phoebe-Lou Adams: ""It is an amazing, totally peculiar piece of work. It may be the best thing ever written about the workings of a painter's mind and eye."" The New York Times, Thursday, February 25, 1999. Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: ""...with cumulative power the entries explain the remarkable experience Schueler underwent upon his arrival at the Sound of Sleat [in Scotland], an experience that allowed him to record on canvas his simultaneous sense of rapture in response to the landscape and his apprehension of death."""

Author Information

"Jon Schueler, an American Abstract Expressionist painter, came to painting late in life, taking his first classes in Los Angeles after he had already married and begun a family. But under teachers Clyfford Still and Richard Diebenkorn at the California School of Fine Arts, he quickly discovered a talent and a love for painting that compelled him to move to New York, where he began to define and perfect his artistic vision.An early prot�g� of Leo Castelli, Schueler lived and worked among the country's most gifted artists: Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and many others. But when in the late 1950s nature became a stronger poetic force in his work, Schueler set off for Scotland. He discovered Mallaig, a town in the Western Highlands 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 uncover what it was that drove 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.JON SCHUELER grew up in Milwaukee and served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. In 1951 he moved to New York and from his base there he sojourned in Scotland, Paris, Italy, and at several universities in the United States. He died in 1992. Magda Salvesen was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland. After obtaining an MA from the University of St Andrews in 1966 (with a scholarship year at Sweet Briar College, VA, USA from 1964 to 1965), she did graduate work in art history at the Courtauld Institute, University of London (MA 1968), and then worked for the Scottish Arts Council in Edinburgh. She met the American artist Jon Schueler in 1970, and after living with him in the Western Highlands of Scotland she followed him to New York in 1976 where they were married. Since then, she has lectured on art history at the New School University and elsewhere; and, from 1988 to 2009 taught landscape design history and theory and other courses at the New York Botanical Garden. Between 2011 and 2021 she was part of the Department of Art, Architecture History, and Urban Studies at NYU as adjunct assistant professor. She co-edited with Diane Cousineau The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life by Jon Schueler, Picador USA, 1999, to be republished in 2023; was the director and executive producer of the video Jon Schueler: A Life in Paint in 1999; and acted as consultant editor for Jon Schueler: To the North, Merrell Publishers, Ltd., London, 2002. In 2005 Artists' Estates: Reputations in Trust, co-edited with Diane Cousineau, was published by Rutgers University Press (republished in 2021) and in 2011 Exploring Gardens and Green Spaces from Connecticut to the Delaware Valley, was published by WW Norton. She lives in New York where she was the curator of the Jon Schueler Estate from 1992 until she became the President of the Jon Schueler Foundation in 2022. Diane Cousineau received a PhD in English (UC Davis, 1975) after completing a thesis on Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Between 1983 and 2008, she taught literature courses at both American and French Universities and published articles on various women writers and a book length study, ""Letters and Labyrinths: Women Writing/Cultural/Codes,"" published in America by the University of Delaware Press, 1997 and in Britain by the Associated University Presses, 1997. She lives in Chestertown, MD."

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