Jon Schueler: From New York to Mallaig

By Douglas Erskine, 30.09.2026

Jon Schueler. Red Sun and Sleat, February-July 1974, Romasaig, Scotland. ©️ Jon Schueler Foundation.

Art and life, life and art: Jon Schueler (1916-1992) was no stranger to the blurred boundary between the two. Passionate, temperamental and deadly-serious, he was a man whose mighty creative appetite had him living and breathing his art. He cast a wide net which embraced the abstract and the real, in America and in Scotland; the result is an oeuvre of striking integrity and serious beauty. Spend time with a Jon Schueler – one of his big, sumptuous sky paintings, now on show at Fidra Fine Art – and have it linger in your mind’s eye for days.

Born into middle-class Milwaukee in 1916, Schueler led a remarkably rich young life: he flew a B-17 bomber during the War, became a writer, a teacher and very nearly a nightclub proprietor, and trained under renowned Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine Arts. In the 1950s, Schueler rubbed shoulders with the likes of Pollock and Rothko as an enthusiastic fixture of the New York art scene. But in 1957, just months after a successful exhibition of abstracts at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery, Schueler’s art and life took an unexpected turn.

Schueler had been dreaming of his ideal landscape since childhood. It was little more than word of mouth that spurred his trip to Scotland. In 1957, he toured the west coast in a rented car until he discovered Mallaig, the fishing village on the Sound of Sleat, facing Skye. In Mallaig, not New York, he encountered the most significant and rewarding experience of his artistic life; for him, the Scottish landscape was “the only church that would do”. He was resident at Romasaig, the village’s old schoolhouse, from 1970 until 1975, returning for months at a time almost every year until his death in New York in 1992.

‘Red Sun and Sleat, February-July 1974, Romasaig, Scotland, o/c443”, Scotland was painted in the heat of Schueler’s almost obsessive investigation into observed phenomena in the natural world. The picture is indebted to place; its title is almost topographical. It addresses the specifics of the scene which confronted him - the clouded sun floating over a thickly-veiled band of blue Sleat - but hints at the universal: pale pink shifts almost imperceptibly into a lovely, lush lavender, lending a sort of luminosity which blushes back at us. It’s a painting which tickles a powerfully human response to the landscape.

But just as ‘Red Sun and Sleat’ had to be painted by someone living under the sway of skies in Mallaig, it’s also the work of a worldly and enquiring artist who had spent time absorbing the lessons of abstraction in New York’s white-hot artistic crucible. Indeed, the painting could easily be read as an abstract, each of its formal elements hanging in harmony across the picture plane, the paint worked with intuitive delight.

Schueler blurs the boundary between the abstract and the real, and the seat of power in his paintings is not perched precariously between one thing and another thing. His work speaks of something total, cumulative and inexplicable. It’s an impressive feat, but Schueler’s great gift was not as referee in a sort of artistic tug of war between the abstract and the real; nor was it his ability to summon myriad weather conditions to stirring atmospheric effect on the canvas. As his great friend Richard Demarco has said, “art is not about showing our fancy footwork”. Schueler’s paintings mine deeper than this.

Mallaig seemed to Schueler the “living image of past dreams”, as if to suggest his experience of the place could unleash something long-dormant and deeply-held. In painting its climate, Schueler was digging deep into “the true nature of experience”. As a transcendentalist, he grappled with nature – which he saw as a reflection of the divine – to explore something higher and mightier; to search for meaning in his own life, “too exquisite to contemplate”. He agonised in his diaries, writing that “life has a range and a power and a drama which is beyond all belief”. His work appears to show that he was out to capture these very elements in paint.

Beyond the abstract and the real, New York and Mallaig, these are ultimately paintings about “the strange and painful gift of life”. Schueler took his inspiration from scenes which are ever-changing, never secure; it has been suggested that Mallaig’s turbulent weather mirrored the artist’s own temperament. In successfully arresting all the ever-changing drama of Mallaig’s skies in singular, fixed images, we have the sense of an artist aspiring to capture something of himself and his own life on canvas; to express the maddeningly mysterious with power, directness and lingering beauty, the hallmarks of his painting.

Jon Schueler’s paintings are currently presented in the group exhibition Coast at Fidra Fine Art, Gullane, alongside works by Dominique Cameron, Marian Leven and Will Maclean. Exhibition runs until 11 October 2026