THE ETERNAL SOURCE
2022 Pucker Gallery Exhibition, Essay by Jeanne Koles
The works in this exhibition are divided between oil painting and pastel. Each has its own unique qualities and offers different approaches to interpreting nature. This distinction between them allows me to investigate different sensibilities. The larger canvases favor a gestural approach, whereas pastels require a subtle and delicate application. I love finding balance between the two mediums and how they feed off one another.
My intention within the subject matter also balances two arenas—the environment and the spirit. The Housatonic River has inspired artists and poets for generations, offering a place for quiet meditation. It continues to be a source of inspiration for me, and a symbol of hope. This resource, once on the verge of destruction due to PCB pollution, has through environmental efforts led by the Housatonic River Initiative rebounded as a resource for wildlife. Our efforts to protect the environment are more important than ever and water and air are of prime concern. Rivers are a source for life, from which a healthy evolution depends, and a reminder of how we must be vigilant with protecting our natural resources.
Monument Mountain has been an iconic subject, visible from many perspectives throughout the area. It was a sacred site of the Mohican Nation, who lived in the Berkshires for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans. With the guidance of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, the top of the mountain formation is now called Peeskawso Peak, which means “virtuous woman” in the Mohican language. Its iconic form is like a gentle sleeping figure, perhaps Mother Nature herself, and these paintings are tributes to her.
My pastels of Konkapot Brook (named after the Mohican sachem, or chief) offer a place for quiet reflection. There is a sacred atmosphere here. Gould Field is one of the many land trusts in the area, just beyond the south gate of Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I often return to this field and the surrounding woodland for contemplation. The meadow frames Monument Valley with Monument Mountain as the centerpiece. The efforts of the Berkshire Natural Resources Council and other organizations have helped to preserve open space for generations. My work preserves a moment of time and a certain light.
What keeps me motivated is a constant amazement of the power of nature—the endless visual stimulus, the beauty that surrounds us. These are places that one can escape to and find healing during difficult times. My intent with the work is to bring the viewer into a meditative place and serve as a reminder of the importance of the healing aspects of nature.
Each artist is on a journey and has to persevere to continue to work. With the support of my family and friends, and through my career as a gallerist working with other artists, I have been lucky to have the opportunity to create the work that I feel is important. It is not always easy, but it is rewarding to be able to paint, to make unique work with my own sensibility.
ONE MOMENT TO THE NEXT
essay by Jeanne Koles
While understanding his upbringing and education, his life in the Berkshires and his travels, his environmentalism, his love for family, and his work in contemporary glass all bring a better understanding of the trajectory of his career, the achievement of Jim Schantz’s work is that we do not need to know these things to feel a kinship with the paintings. We only need to stand in front of one to be enveloped and transported to a sun-filled hill, a languid river, a breathtaking sunset, to a view that ultimately bring us into ourselves, our memories, feelings, and dreams. Each work by Schantz is a symphony of complementary elements—light and shadow, fine and broad strokes, warm and cool tones, movement and stillness—all harmoniously balanced in the perfect metaphor for the ebb and flow of our daily lives.
It is tempting to draw facile conclusions about the art of Jim Schantz. Straightforward in its beauty and uncomplicated by didactic narrative, it has remained stylistically consistent for thirty years. But Leonardo da Vinci said that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Behind the easiness of Jim Schantz lies a nuanced and enlightened artist, knowledgeable about art and art historical traditions, well-read in philosophy, open to self-reflection, and constantly seeking a deeper appreciation of himself and his subject. It is these characteristics that make his seemingly simple work so captivating and nourishing. As verbal as he is visual, Schantz possesses an unusual gift for egoless self-awareness and self-expression, often speaking poetically about his passion for his work, his connection to nature, and the life experiences that drive his art. The trajectory of his work arcs along an auto-biographical path; pivotal moments and practical exigencies are mirrored in work that conspicuously excludes material evidence of the outside world. Each work by Schantz—whether expansive or introverted, joyful or melancholy—resonates with his vision of nature as a place to reflect, find solace, and explore the spiritual.
Schantz’s interest in nature and penchant for drawing began in childhood, though he was not compelled to be a nature artist from an early age. Growing up in Perth Amboy, NJ, Jim spent summers surfing in Seaside, whiling away the often long waits for the next wave contemplating the ocean. He loved drawing, but mostly buildings and scenes of Perth Amboy, leading him to apply to the School of Architecture at Syracuse. Enrolling in some basic art courses in the fall while waiting for the architecture program to begin in the spring, Schantz changed course to be a fine arts major and credits this semester of focus on drawing for his foundation in solid draftsmanship.
His junior year abroad at Hornsey School of Art in North London opened Schantz both to the richness of museum culture and the font of inspiration that art history provides the contemporary artist. His work clearly evokes the great 19th century British landscape artists who were invigorated by nature’s purity and harmony, though Schantz never lapses into the fear of the Sublime that ultimately drove the Romantic Movement. After graduating from Syracuse magna cum laude in 1977, Schantz and his fiancée Jude Magin moved to New York, where he worked in advertising and studied part-time at the Brooklyn Museum School (where his first forays into pastel occurred). Having befriended American Expressionist Alice Neel (1900-1984) he became immersed in the fascinating lifestyle of the professional artist. While he could see himself following in this path, the birth of his first daughter Magin, also made him pursue the more stable route of being a full-time university art professor.
To that end, he ventured west in 1979 to get his Master’s degree from the University of California, Davis. His choice of schools was in part motivated by the opportunity to study and work with Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920), a Pop/Realist artist whose brightly-colored images of confections, consumer goods, and Northern California land and cityscapes are defined by interplay between permeating light and hyperbolic shadow. Schantz felt an affinity to the school of California still-life and landscape artists that Thiebaud represented and as a graduate student he got the opportunity to teach alongside his mentor and observe his working methods. Schantz remembers Thiebaud as an academic man, learned in art history, who preferred teaching the basics to young artists and instilling the importance of classical training. Schantz admired Thiebaud’s commitment to and passion for teaching, even though the status he had achieved as an artist would have afforded him the luxury to leave teaching behind.
In California, Schantz also encountered a warm light that drew him outdoors; his still-lifes became more saturated with sunlight, imbued with incandescent colors, and accentuated by strong shadows. Glinting green apples pop against the vivid stripes of 4th of July Still Life (1981), as the objects on the table cast prominent shadows. During the summer of graduate school, Schantz received the Skowhegan Fellowship and brought his wife and daughter cross-country to the picturesque lakeside school of painting and sculpture in Maine, visiting Yellowstone National Park and Badlands National Monument along the way. It was a seminal time in the genesis of Schantz as a nature artist as he saw nature at her most awesome but also communed with her at an intimate level. While at Skowhegan, Schantz turned his artistic attention to nature, painting images of the lake outside his cottage as it refracted light throughout the day, noting as the hues of the landscape changed subtly but perceptibly from one moment to the next.
After receiving his MFA at Davis, and with the birth of his second daughter Gwen, Schantz accepted a position as a university art professor at California State College, Stanislaus. He enjoyed how the synergistic student-teacher relationship widened his own ideas about art. In 1982, with the determination to be closer to family back east and attracted by a physically beautiful and culturally rich atmosphere, Schantz accepted a position in the art department of Berkshire Community College. Turmoil accompanied the move as a state budget crunch meant the position never materialized. Instead, Schantz became involved in the promotion of the Contemporary Glass Movement as a gallerist in Stockbridge. The following year Schantz became the head of the Art and Art History Department at Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield, an apt environment given that Schantz and his wife soon had their third daughter, Torey. Schantz remained at Miss Hall’s school until 1987, when he and Jude divorced.
Despite this difficult family adjustment, residing in the Berkshires was life-altering and profoundly positive. Schantz wanted his artwork to reflect this. The land became his mentor, driving his aesthetic away from the abstract approach of his still-lifes and towards an expressive realism that celebrates the intangible gifts of nature. In the intervening thirty years, this landscape—simultaneously powerful yet fragile, timeless yet ever-changing—has bestowed endless inspiration and been an anchor and source of strength. By 1989, the challenges of the previous few years began to give way to more joys and successes. Schantz met Kim Saul, an artist from Western Massachusetts who shared his interest in representational painting and love of nature. They married in 1991. 1989 also marked Schantz's first one person exhibition at Pucker Gallery in Boston, a relationship that continues to this day and has fostered much of Schantz’s artistic development.
Schantz’s earliest Berkshire works are not really landscapes at all, but stylized oil paintings like Berkshire Contemplation (1984), showing people living in a bucolic environment, enjoying its leisurely pace and natural beauty. In the course of a few years, the people and homes disappear and the landscape comes into focus. Schantz defines his earliest landscape paintings, work such as Blue Hill, Pink Clouds (1989), as “primitive” sketches—childlike in their innocence though not naïve in their execution (perhaps reflecting the fact that he was at the time a father to three young, precocious little girls). Color-blocked and dramatically lit, they reflect his affiliation with Thiebaud and the more Symbolist approach of his younger work as they conjure imagined landscapes significantly less representational than what he would later draw. (This tactic of culling the landscape down to its essence and allowing it to be a contemplative refuge would later resurface in a more sophisticated way as Schantz continued to explore ways of representing the landscape). Originally, he relied on sketches to gather impressions of a place, which is also why the early works are more about aura than physical exactness. But Schantz was a busy man for whom the convenience of photography supplanted the luxury of leisurely sketching. Once Schantz allowed himself to use the camera, he was rarely without it, always taking snapshots of inspiring vignettes spotted in the comings and goings of his harried days. He quickly realized that photographs preserved the light in a way that his sketches never could, making the light in his work even more nuanced.
Soon his work became more detailed as he strove to turn the fleeting glimpses his camera had captured into lingering moments. Moving from oil to pastel was originally about convenience as it afforded Schantz the ability to work efficiently while conjuring in his studio the emotional immediacy he had felt while in the landscape. Though he had been trained as a painter, he soon started to feel one with this new medium. The technical detail of site-specific works like October Crescent (1988) and Spring Lilacs (1989) reveal an artist languishing in his discovery of nature as a subject and dutifully articulating the unique aspects of each scene. March Verticals (1989), an example of the more microscopic style of this era, hones in on the forest but is no less noble than later, more panoramic work. January Road (1989) still contains references to human existence that would today seem out of place in one of Schantz’s landscapes, but is nonetheless powerfully evocative for anyone who has ever driven an unpaved New England road after a snowstorm, when the sky becomes a piercingly clear blue and banks of snow stand like sentinels on the roadside. Even within his early tendency for mechanical veracity, Schantz was always in touch with the poetic and the romantic.
The fascination with the Berkshires that initially impelled Schantz to notice every little detail settled into a more significant appreciation for living there and being nourished by her gifts every day. Schantz became so attuned to the weather and wind patterns, the changes of season and their effects on the land, that he intuitively knew where to find the most vivid sunsets and gorgeously-lit river bends. The camera became less a tool to memorialize happenstance than to capture now-familiar scenes in their most brilliant light and intense coloration, and painting again became about coaxing the essence and feeling out of imagined (though always representational) landscapes. The luminous evening sky of February, Maple Sunset (1992) spreads dramatically behind sharply-defined trees, deftly evoking winter’s windy chill as the sun sets while still encompassing warmth and fullness. Taconic Valley, Violet Field (1993) is a virtual color study, incorporating a palette of blues and purples—subsumed in shadow on the hills, fading to blush when tinged by sunset’s dim light, or woven in a kaleidoscope in the waving grass.
A comfort with his surroundings was coupled with greater dexterity in his medium, allowing Schantz to focus more on process and explore how medium can drive style as much as philosophy does. Throughout the 1990s, Schantz worked the soft pastels in layers to create unctuous pools of gradated colors while drawing with the sharp edges of the pastel stick to achieve wispy lines. This juxtaposition of swaths of color with finely rendered features, coupled with Schantz’s focus on compositional symmetry, allowed him to achieve a formal harmony that reflected the peacefulness of nature. Schantz became more interested in developing themes, and like Monet and his haystacks he explored the limitlessness of inspiration in a single thing. One recurring motif for Schantz during this period was the siting of a single tree or a group of trees against dramatic fields and skies formed by layers of redolent colors. The melancholy Winter Twilight Series #2 (1992) corresponds to the time after Schantz’s father died, while Summer Afternoon, Maple (1998) evokes a more jovial sensibility. In these and other works like Winter Pine Duo, (Sunset) (1996) and Summer Afternoon, Maple (1998), anthropomorphized trees dance in the wind to demonstrate the innate harmony and musicality of nature.
Beginning in the early 2000s, the river became his haystacks. Schantz moved to Glendale, MA, to a disused church that he and Kim renovated into a spectacular live-work space. Rambling at the edge of the property is the Housatonic River, literally bringing home the metaphor of water as a source of reflection. After 9/11, Schantz sought solace in the river, contemplating not just its physical beauty but its curative powers, its connection to the spiritual, and its profundity as a visual symbol. Many works from this time feature a vanishing point where the river meets the horizon then disappears endlessly into the unknown—a trope for the destination point of man’s inner journey. Once again privileging expression over representation, Schantz revisited the abstract tendencies of his early work without ever abandoning his commitment to reality. Editing the elements to their essential forms and hues allows the painting to be a conduit of expression, a conjurer of sensations, and a creator of universal narrative.
Works like October Dusk, Housatonic Reflection (2000), August Housatonic Reflection, Loosestrife (2002), and End of Summer, Housatonic Sunset (2003), among many others, contain all the elements—both artistic and philosophical—that defined Schantz during this time. Sky and water play off one another infinitely, absorbing the viewer in a contemplative, transcendent, and restorative mentality. The stillness that is established by symmetry and lack of tension is complemented by subtle movement in the trees, water, and clouds. That the river simultaneously embodies seemingly divergent ideas of constancy and evolution is comforting to us when we seek an anchor in our own fluctuating lives. Finding boundless inspiration in the river, Schantz became fiercely protective of it. With his children grown, Schantz had more time to devote not only to his art, but to his work in contemporary glass and to his community. In 2007, he joined the Stockbridge Conservation Commission, a local arm of the Massachusetts Cultural Commission responsible for protecting the state’s wetlands. The committee is charged with oversight when construction occurs in the river’s vicinity and with community education and outreach.
His focus on the river not only led Schantz to a more cultivated version of his earlier Symbolist style, it brought him back to oil painting as well. The liquidity of oil paint felt attuned to the water’s flow and the slower pace of painting correlated with the idea of the river as place to slow down and ruminate. The soft rosy light that peeks behind the horizon of After the Storm (Housatonic Summer Dusk) (2008) dissipates languidly in the water as we feel the humid air rising from the surface in a sfumato blending of paint. Layered tones in the water, sky, and foliage do an optical dance and create a mesmerizing depth, just realistic enough for us to remind us of a place we can intuitively connect to but dreamy enough to transport us to introspection. September Sundown Reflection (2010) is a quintessential work by Schantz writ anew; the essence of autumn is expressed in the feverish sunset and amplified by a limitless palette of mixed pigments. Like the American Luminist painters of the mid-19th century, artists such as George Inness (1825-1894) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), Schantz ennobles the landscape by infusing it with a majestic light and celebrating its innate tranquility.
Schantz continued to utilize pastel in his work, specifically in sky pieces such as End of Summer Sunset and Skyscape, Spring Dusk, both from 2005. While the river pieces were a grounding force representing the journey inward, Schantz also looked outward to forces greater than himself. His mother was ill, and though perhaps not conscious of it at the time, he was occupied by ponderous issues of death and the afterlife. Psychologically, the sky provides solace that we are not alone; stylistically it lends itself to abstraction because its elements are so few and so universal. The vast and mysterious expanse of sky symbolizes spiritual presence in many religions and philosophies, and has a long art historical tradition as a metaphor for what is beyond our earthbound, material existence.
In 2006, Schantz was invited by Mark Ludwig, a violist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and founder of the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation (a non-profit organization dedicated to assuring the permanence of the music written by composers who perished in the Holocaust) to participate in a special music and art project. Schantz has always loved music, listening to jazz to inspire his more energetic pieces or classical when creating contemplative ones. (A 2003 project called Places of the Spirit partnered Schantz with flutist Paula Robison as they painted and played along an imaginary day’s stroll through the Berkshires). Ludwig was introduced to Schantz at the Pucker Gallery, in Boston, where he purchased a sunset piece. As part of his work at the Terezín Foundation, Ludwig asked Schantz to interpret through painting the music of Hans Krása (1899-1944), a Czech composer killed at Auschwitz who had been an integral organizer of the cultural life at the Theresienstadt (Terezín concentration camp in Germany, now part of the Czech Republic). Listening to the music, Schantz envisioned a strong and dramatic sunset. In a series of performances culminating at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, Schantz painted in situ while the orchestra played Krása’s music, scaling the works larger and intensifying the sunset as the project progressed.
Turning his gaze upward provided Schantz a creative change, one he had been quietly yearning for after many years with a more terrestrial focus. Tiepolo Sunset (2010) and After the Storm (2011) are voluminous and energetic paintings on a simple subject, open doors to the more complex plane of spiritually meditation. The variegated hues of the sky explode with incandescent light as it refracts against clouds or recently fallen rain. These sky works (and other works of this era where sky is a major focal point) channel the sumptuousness and luminosity of the Venetian painter for which one of them is name, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) but are more Impressionistic, emphasizing visible brushstroke composed of areas of color that optically meld together.
Even after thirty years with a singular artistic muse, Schantz remains enamored and inspired to achieve da Vinci’s “ultimate sophistication” out of seeming simplicity. From early site-specific paintings to today’s imagined renderings, Schantz celebrates how natural physical beauty can transport us to an intangible place where the demands of life give way to more spiritual pursuits. The universality of this notion allows Schantz to take bring his artistic eye to other awe-inspiring natural locations, such as when a follow-up CD project with flutist Paula Robison called Places of the Spirit II: The Holy Land brought him to Israel in 2007. This universality also allows his viewers to viscerally connect with his landscapes, even if they have never visited the places pictured.
While understanding his upbringing and education, his life in the Berkshires and his travels, his environmentalism, his love for family, and his work in contemporary glass all bring a better understanding of the trajectory of his career, the achievement of Jim Schantz’s work is that we do not need to know these things to feel a kinship with the paintings. We only need to stand in front of one to be enveloped and transported to a sun-filled hill, a languid river, a breathtaking sunset, to a view that ultimately bring us into ourselves, our memories, feelings, and dreams. Each work by Schantz is a symphony of complementary elements—light and shadow, fine and broad strokes, warm and cool tones, movement and stillness—all harmoniously balanced in the perfect metaphor for the ebb and flow of our daily lives.