TRAVELING HOPEFULLY

Art isn’t always easy on the eyes. From Wassily Kandinsky to Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer to Jean-Michel Basquiat, painters have long challenged the concept of a “proper” picture. Tweaking form and content, they’ve expanded our visual reality, opening our eyes to new ways of seeing. Casual museum or gallery-goers often dismiss seemingly extreme works of art as bids for attention, a selfish need to shock. But for Evanston artist Matthew Schaefer, the creative process can’t be categorized so simply. As he explained in a video produced by the Skokie Public Library, “As I apply the pigment, I try to enter a meditation state where I bring my focus to that point where the paint is touching the canvas at that moment, to hold my focus there while I am doing this and I think that helps transfer what might loosely be termed intuitive energy to the canvas.”

Raised on the East Coast in an art-appreciating family that regularly visited museums, Schaefer attended Silvermine College of Art in New Canaan, Connecticut, where the curriculum included drawing, painting, design, and art history classes. Thanks to the encouragement of his family and his experience at Silvermine in the late ‘60s, which he describes as “Very progressive for the times … rebellious in its own nature,” he pursued art with a passion, moving from a dark palette to an almost Fauvist exuberance. Along the way, his consciousness and artistic sensibility were expanded by various encounters, including a depiction of the Crucifixion by Rembrandt that presented him with the “realization of a visual order beyond the intellect.”

Essentially abstract but embedded with representations of the female form, “a muse that has haunted me through my life, haunting because of its elusive behavior between desire and understanding” and the built environment, Schaefer’s work possesses a shattered, vibrating quality, a kind of impressionistic-meets-expressionistic tension. These works don’t resolve quickly to the eye, but neither do they repel our glance. “The nature of my style,” he explains, “refers to my inner self, which unconsciously energizes my artistic decisions. The use of color is completely inspired by the moment.”

There is an “of-the-moment feeling” in every aspect of his work, a sense of spontaneity, an immediacy that underscores the essence of painting as action, as gesture. “In my painting world, there are two types of paintings,” he observes. “One represents objectivity. One represents subjectivity. One is material, one is immaterial, one is illusion, one is medium … it’s really how our brain takes it in, whether we go to an illusionistic space, when we’re seeing a scene, or whether we’re present with a surface.”

Decades into his career, Schaefer still delights in the process of art making, the uncertainty—adept as he is—that accompanies the search for a true image. “I seek further knowledge about existence and life, and I think where you find that is in beauty, the inexplicable presence of beauty.” Pursuing beauty, finding a way to pin it down in paint, is an ongoing journey. “I continue to develop the skill,” he shares, “and you do that by pushing your skill, always pushing your skill to the limit, or even a little bit beyond, especially that little bit beyond, because that little bit beyond what you don’t know, makes you edge your way along. What are you edging toward? I guess, a clearer idea of how to live your life in a positive way.”

For more information, visit artisallshesaid.com.