Robert Paul Wolff, an American philosopher and violist, had an interesting insight as to how the “formal constraints” of a given art form may actually facilitate an artist’s rich, vital, and transcendent expressions:

One of my principal aesthetic pleasures is the contemplation of the work of an artist who simultaneously embraces and transcends the formal constraints of an art form.  Consider, as an example, the fugue.  The rules of musical composition governing the writing of a fugue are severe indeed, stipulating as they do the sequence of voices or lines, the interval at which each enters, and so forth.  In the hands of a journeyman composer, these restraints are all too evident, and conspire to produce a work that is tedious and predictable.  But not when Bach writes a fugue. Bach plays with the rules, teases them, inverts them, all the while conforming to them rigorously.  The result is a beauty that seems both spontaneous, free form, utterly expressive, and yet is a perfect instantiation of the inviolable rules of the fugue. 

Reclining Nude by William Schultz, 18×24 in (46×61 cm)­­­

I knew and worked with Bill Schultz for decades. What I wish to show you is an example of how, as a traditional painter, he both simultaneously embraced and transcended the formal constraints of the method he used.  Those of you who have worked with me would know  that he broke down  the painting process into five stages. What concerns us here are only the four oil painting stages which may be summarized as the oscillation between two line and two color stages. In the first line stage, structure is established and is followed by the scumbling of veils of color which establish the sense of atmospheric color, the color that bathes everything in the subject and, therefore,  provides a harmony.  This is the “underpainting” and in the process of scumbling “breath on glass” like veils, the initial set of structural lines is lost. Thus, a set of darker lines are required to re-establish structure. This darker set of lines then propel the work forward into the second color stage where the painter builds with a variety of strokes of color to express the specificity of color to which she is invited to respond.

Schultz, in the painting seen above, demonstrates that the function of the method is not to churn out a tedious and predictable picture of the subject. The stages are not an assembly line. Instead, they break the sensory experience of the painter into pieces. Each piece functions as a prompt. The task of the painter is to put the pieces back together in a way that freshly realizes – makes clear – who she is. It is, fundamentally, a process of becoming. The painting happens along the way.

The painting was done in a class which meant it had to be done in one sitting, in less than three hours. So the challenge for Schultz was how to move among the parts, maintain control, and respond to, in each stage, those visual sensations that moved him. Here’s what I see him doing: his theme will be tonality or atmospheric color, so subtle as to be very nearly invisible to most ordinary observers and to most painters. He will do this in three ways: 1) he will begin by tinting the canvas the color and value of the color in the room; 2) he will play down line and the vivid painting of specific color, 3) and play up the underpainting, or the scumbling of overlapping veils of color that he sees as constitutive of the space in which the model reclines.

In each of the three images above (click to enlarge), you can see Schultz doing what I’ve just described. Notice how extensively just the tinted canvas shows through, it is just about everywhere. Much of the painted areas has been done by means of scumbling, that is, not specific brushstrokes. He is playing down the specificity of color one would normally see in a loose painting and he is playing up the sense that we are peering through veils. In Image 2, we see that he has left in place the construction line on the right side of the thigh, sensitively found in some places and lost in others. In other words, he is choosing to allow all the stages or sensual pieces to remain visible. Also, in Image 2, we see his use of gray strokes of color at the knee and calf. Here he is using the painting stage, delicately, to augment the sense of atmospheric color.

Note, too, in Image 3, where we begin to see a variety of color (yellowish, pinkish, orangish at the top, cobalt in the brushwork, turquoise at the bottom), only the cobalt blue is actually painted and all the while, in that same specific area that is painted with obvious brushstrokes, the ground (atmospheric color) is present.

In the above set of images (click to enlarge), we see a range of painterly strokes with varied color. These are where the actual painting, or building with color, is strongest. The ever-present ground – quiet as it is, interestingly, acts as a foil to and gives his brushwork greater purchase. Not surprisingly, these more strongly painted areas are balanced by stronger line, not line that describes, however. The dark lines under the torso, around the bicep, shoulder and neck characterize and give weight to the form.  The nod to atmosphere is made manifest even in his vigorous brushwork: the blues in the hair and face, the very light emerald green just below the shoulder, the warmer green around the torso and breast clearly are not local color but atmospheric color. The space in which the model reclines, not just the model, has been given life.

Conclusion

In each of the areas identified, there is evidence of multiple stages. One stage, while it may beget the next, is never displaced or made silent. As with a string quartet, there is a conversation among the pieces or stages. And as with a jazz quartet, there is spontaneity and improvisation. Schultz did not see a woman or a bed or bedsheets. He’s not making a picture. He saw only line and color, captured, one suspects, by a sense of interactive fascination. Image 3, for example, could pass as a standalone abstract piece. In fact, the entire work could be said to have been gotten through abstraction because throughout the entire work, the process permitted Schultz to stay in the moment that the assemblage of line and color presented.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said about Cézanne that he wanted “to make visible how the world touches us.” I’m not sure I would go so far as to characterize Schultz’s motivation that way but, suffice it to say, when we look at his work he clearly was making visible how the world was touching him. Or to paraphrase Wolff, the result is a beauty that seems both spontaneous, free form, utterly expressive, and yet is a perfect instantiation of the inviolable rules that required him to break down his sensory experience into a structured set of stages, each with its specific steps, all the while oscillating between line and color.