Ward Schumaker
Transformative Text - Geography Lessons at Zeitgeist Gallery
By Denise Stewart-Sanabria
November 10, 2011
Art Now Nashville
Ward Schumaker has been interpreting text into visual narrative for most of his working life. Though he started out in fine art over 40 years ago, he evolved into an internationally recognized illustrator for most of his career and is still heavily involved in the business. His illustrational style uses text as an integral part of the drawing to identify his clients and their products. Eleven years ago, he journeyed back into his mind to create for himself.
Geography Lessons, his second exhibit at Zeitgeist Gallery, is imagery contained within, or detached from, the construct of the codex. Three artist books join nine isolated framed pages in a richly tactile and absorbing show. Schumaker’s process begins with morning meditation. The random words and streams of consciousness that evolve during these sessions – and also from his dreams – form the narratives of his various series. He seeks to be a kind of visual medium, searching to process ideas that are larger than he is. The results are confined to, but seem to expand from, the pages of his hand-bound books.
Ironically, his choice of media is mainly book paste. Wielding it like paint, and indeed often mixing it with acrylic, it is brushed and scraped on in layers that cover his surfaces like the detritus of time. The text, both stenciled and cut, joins random clippings often sourced from vintage French magazines and newspapers. French companies still make up the majority of Schumaker’s commercial clientele, and he has no shortage of media brought back from his regular trips to the country.
In Moon Atlas, a 56-page book, Schumaker’s poetic and minimalist rendering of the awareness of planetary movement translate the concept into a mysterious science that might be confused with mythology. He has utilized magazine clippings of France’s original coverage of the American moon landing, which lends an additional disorientation to the discourse. Pages of monochromatic moon-mapping images are jarred by the intrusion of intense color, as when day follows night.
The nine framed pages reference geographic regions that are united in a general sense of remoteness. They are heavily atmospheric, and contain visual abstractions that along with the text seem to describe mood, or fleetingly remembered details of place. In The Himalayas, burnt orange smears of what could be blood or dirt are overlaid with the white of cracked, dirty ice. The Carpathians is darker, and dramatic. The faded text of its name is ominously surrounded by dark cloud forms and slashing vertical lines of pigment.
In Zaragoza, the text “Puente” (bridge) is stenciled along the top and underlined with a broad stroke of black, bringing to mind Zaragoza Puente which spans the Rio Grande and connects El Paso, Texas to Juarez, Mexico. Though it might be a bit of a literal translation on my part, the colors underlying Schumaker’s pale gray smears of pure book paste reflect the earth tones of the semi-arid geographic area. The tone of the unpigmented paste is the constant throughout Geography Lessons. It grounds the work in a solid organic base that connects to much of the source material that we are familiar with, in our pursuit of how we document geography: from old maps, plaster reliefs, low contrast interstellar satellite photographs, to the negative space of the book page.
Ward Schumaker: Sacred Texts
by Jarrett Earnest - February 16, 2008
www.kala.org/wordpress/?s=schumaker
“So saying, I wept, my heart crushed with very bitterness. And behold, suddenly I heard a voice from the house next door; the sound, as it might be, of a boy or a girl, repeating in a sing-song voice a refrain unknown to me: ‘Pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it.’”
- Augustine, Confessions
Augustine, the early father of the Christian church, describes his revelatory conversion as hearing a command to read. As he read the Gospel of Paul he describes that “the light of steadfast trust” poured onto his heart and he at that moment shed his lustful former life. This participates in and strengthens the very rich tradition in Western theology of the deep importance of words as spiritual acts. The gospel of John begins by stating: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). In fact to look at the Biblical creation as detailed in Genesis, God speaks all creation into existence with the sheer force of words.
In an age more saturated by words than ever, from advertisements, magazines, and the ever-present Internet the sort of power words wield in this Biblical context is never present if even conceivable. What is at stake is the idea of a sacred text and whether or not that can even exist in contemporary life in any meaningful way.
Ward Schumaker’s exhibition of books and drawings at Meridian Gallery profoundly explores these issues. With some seventeen large drawings on display the intimate and architectural unconventional rooms of Meridian’s second floor are transformed into grottos of spiritual import. The images of these drawings are often difficult to decipher, with many veils of paint, renegade lines, and half masticated text all swirling across the plane of the image and around the room. Each Plexiglas sheet covering the drawings reflects and distorts the image of the viewer and other works as one walks through the space in a manner that recalls primordial existence; the spirit of God moving across the face of the heterogeneous muck before it is divided into water and land. This is the desire of total union with the divine, the pre-fall from grace state, or the articulation of such a desire. The written words that surface and sink in the fertile plane of paint are aestheticized spiritual contemplation. To read these texts is to work through them. Visually the drawings are the colors of the delta soil after the flooding river retreats, ash rising on smoke into the grey sky, and every stage of the life cycle of serious bruises. They are populated with willowy lines of controlled drips, carving out an elegant system of veins and proto-pictograms. These drips speak to the orientation of the image plane; the paper must have been not only vertical and horizontal but also rotated in gyrations of all 360 degrees to achieve the appropriate runs. Thus these frozen rivulets reinforce the flatness and material surface of the paper but open up mentally an illusionistic space of deeper, three-dimensional implications.
As grave and sincere as the intentions of the work are it is not without the loveliest sense of play, as evidenced by the range of text dealt with, from St. Augustine to Rumplestiltskin, Leibniz to the Three Penny Opera. The key work to the show is the large diptych Saved (2007) at the entrance. The grey expanse of the two panels are marked by smudged approaching storms of darkness and accented by black marks, a diagramed lineage of a spiritual family tree. Twenty-one times “saved” blossoms about the image in the rusting color of drying blood. Beneath all this, almost unperceivable but ever palpable, is the text of the penultimate song of Brecht’s Three Penny Opera in which the scoundrel Mack the Knife is delivered the news of his pardon by the Queen’s riding messenger. Imbedded in Brecht and Weill’s expressionist satire is, for Schumaker, a most potent allegory of salvation and divine grace, one that it is irrational, total, and unplanned for. This text is repeated several times throughout the exhibition in various materials and levels of concealment.
The true heart and soul of the exhibition are the hand painted books, displayed on long planks in the center of the main gallery. One is free to touch them, each page a tactile skin. Almost geologic layers of cut paper, paste, and paint accumulate and mark the descent into their weighty world. The process of turning becomes the very ritual of meditation. This is reinforced by the repetition of the often-obliterated text, page after page becoming a mantra, with phrases like “Everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and I receive as I have asked.”
Today the book format in general is no longer a utilitarian necessity for conveying information or concepts as the proliferation of digital formats make evident. Schumaker’s books are about what texts can do. They can be difficult, unwieldy, and won’t relinquish their meaning so easily. To read a book is not just to transfer quantifiable words as the ever-buzzing computer monitor is apt to, but instead allows a transmission of a spiritual experience. The galleries are transformed into altars of self-exploration, and the experience of working through the materiality of Schumaker’s tomes is the space of the contemporary sacred text. One that is active, open, associative, complex, and profoundly personal. This work hails us, just as does Augustine’s divine vision, to “pick it up and read it,” and in the process provides the possibility for ones own ecstatic conversion.
(written by Jarrett Earnest)
February 17th, 2008 - Posted in Reviews