Body/Land: A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid

Body/Land

A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid 1

Th is pro je ct is d e d icat e d to my gur u Pa ra mha nsa Yoga na nda .

Body/Land A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid

exhibition curator & essayist Gordon L. Fuglie

interview Hazel Antaramian Hofman

Fresno Art Museum (work from years 2006–2012) January 22 – May 1, 2016

Art Space Gallery Fresno City College (work from years 2001–2005) February 22 – April 7, 2016

Arte Américas (work from years 1989–2000) March 3 – May 22, 2016

Detail: “The Safety of Constraint” from the The Warnors Window Project, 2009

2

Table of Contents

5

Foreword M i c h e l e e l l i s P r ac y Executive Director & Chief Curator Fresno Art Museum

9

Landscape to Body to . . . Body/Land Gordon l. FuGlie

35

Interview with anne Scheid h a z e l a n ta r a M i a n h o F M a n

3

52

Catalogue of the Exhibition

54

anne Scheid Biography

56

acknowledgements

4

The Earth is Endlessly Deep from Earthbody, 2007

M i c h e l e e l l i s P r ac y

Foreword

Three Fresno exhibiting institutions are hosting sections of artist Anne Scheid’s work spanning the last twenty-five years. The breadth, scale, and sheer power of Scheid’s imagery dictates that the 40 works be installed at the Fresno Art Museum, ArtSpace Gallery of Fresno City College and Arte Américas during the Winter and Spring of 2016. Spanning the years 1988 to the present, Body/Land is the Retrospective of a Fresno-based woman artist who established her art world reputation living and working in this region of the country.

As one travels to the galleries separately housing Anne Scheid’s Body/Land exhibition, it is important to realize she became an art student in the 1970s, a pivotal decade for American artists who happened to be female. At that time, women enrolled in “high art” education were few in number compared to men. Forty-five years ago, Linda Nochlin wrote in her book Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? that the institutional power structures made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their [so-called] talent or genius.”

Anne Scheid had her first solo exhibition in 1977 at the Browne Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio at the height of the feminist movement. In 1985, the art group Guerrilla Girls was formed in New York City by seven women artists who became the political “voice” heralding the worth of burgeoning and established women artists across the board.

Overtly acknowledged or not, Scheid was bolstered by this era which insisted that women artists mattered and that they were to be celebrated.

What Scheid accomplishes over her thirty plus years as an artist, visually and palpably, is confidence. We see it birthed and maturing in Body/Land I and II at ArtSpace and Arte Américas and crescendoing in Body/Land III at the Fresno Art Museum. Her art epitomizes the power, purity and purposefulness of being a woman artist spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Anne Scheid embraces this challenge to persevere and succeed by making the art she wants to make for an audience that can appreciate it.

As viewers, we are fortunate.

5

6

Sun Bleached, 1988 Not in Exhibition

7

The Fallen IV, 2004

My ar t is a ge st ure for cha nge a nd hop e.

8

Women Make by Water, 2001

an n e

sc heid

Gordon l. FuGlie

Landscape to Figure to . . . Body/Land

Prologue As a first principle of art, I have always thought drawing is what every artist must know how to do. That maxim was lodged in my adolescent mind when I entered my first life drawing class decades ago. But I wasn’t prepared for the hard wooden bench—known as a “horse”—upon which I had to sit, propping my large sketchbook against an upright plank. At less than an arm’s distance, the empty sheet of paper seemed to taunt my modest talent. Subject? In walked a lean, bathrobe-clad, sixfoot tall, middle-aged female. After a cursory introduction from our instructor, the woman—our class model—doffed her robe, briskly mounted the platform, assumed her pose, and gazed firmly into space. Just 10 feet from where I was seated, she was the first live naked human being that I had ever seen outside of boys’ P.E. classes; and the model being female didn’t help my focus.

It took a few anxious sessions to overcome my anxiety, and I adjusted to the studio routine. During the semester a stream of models—male and female; young and old; thin and heavy-set; white, black, Latino and Asian—came and went. But try as I might, switching back and forth from pencil to charcoal to crayon—the so-called dry media—my studies of the human body remained inert, mere transcriptions of physical contours. I had to confess that my drawings did not convey the life posed before me.

Would my luck change if I chose a less challenging subject? Why not landscape? With her elemental contours dotted with shrubs, trees, and rocks and cleft by streams, Mother Nature just might summon forth my resistant inner artist. Alas, success still eluded me. I was no Cézanne; my landscape drawings were devoid of the French master’s distilling eye, mastery of space, and the technical assurance that enlivened his sketches of Mont Sainte-Victoire and Aix-en-Provence. Making a drawing was one thing; making it art, another.

9

Throwing in the towel after these short-lived efforts to learn to draw artistically, I took shelter in my rationalization that drawing was at best a transitional medium that led to the “real art” of painting, sculpture and printmaking. I carried this Modernist baggage into my work as an art historian and curator until the 1980s when the category-defying expressions sprouting in postmodern art upended my narrow views. Just as the Soviet Bloc’s Iron Curtain came down at decade’s end, so did the collapse of Modernist Art’s official redoubts, its sanctioned precincts of styles, hierarchies of media (“painting is king, and drawing is its handmaiden”), and their policed segregation by curators, academics and critics who insisted on formal definitions by media, e.g. a drawing must be only a drawing, a painting must be painted, and a print must be done in an edition of identical impressions.1 At the time I was being disabused of my limited and outdated notions of what art ought to be, Anne Scheid came of age as a creative drawer. The 1970s and 1980s were tumultuous decades in the American art world, a period when a number of diverse tendencies and trends seemed to erupt one on the heels of another: feminist art; Latino/Chicano art; the “pictures generation”; pattern and decoration painting; photo/ media art; deconstruction/theory-based art—and all newly overlain with the hype and inflation (as in the advent of naked careerism and skyrocketing auction prices) of the speculative international art market.2 Amidst this head-spinning hubbub, Scheid calmly enrolled in Cincinnati’s Edgecliff College, a small, sequestered Catholic liberal arts school overlooking the Ohio River where she decided to focus exclusively on drawing local landscapes, but in a new key. A decade later she would turn her attention to the figure. And shortly after arriving in Fresno in 1991, Scheid would undertake a series of monumental drawing projects that attempted to contrast, integrate, and finally combine the human body with the landscape.

Land: Beginnings Artistic creativity remains a furtive quality, eluding easy explanation. Why an artist with sparse family support and few resources instinctively can produce vibrant work, while another—guided through arts-oriented prep schools and blue-chip university art programs only to achieve mediocre expressions—confounds our expectations. Instead of trying to make sense of this, I think we should be more open to the artistic vocation as a gift—a spiritual blessing, though certainly not without its distinctive burdens.3 Anne Scheid grew up in an industrious white collar German Catholic family in Cincinnati. Her father and uncle were successful entrepreneurs. An artistic prodigy in her Catholic high school, Scheid earned numerous scholarships, and selected Edgecliff College, a local Catholic school where she was one of 15 freshman art majors. Countering the myth of self-exile that mandates studying anywhere but your hometown, Edgecliff soon proved to be the ideal incubator for Scheid’s burgeoning talents. There she was tutored by Ann Beiersdorfer, an artist and nun in the Religious Sisters of Mercy (R.S.M.) whose personal care for her students was renowned.

Beiersdorfer’s pedagogy held encouragement and critique in a delicate balance as she helped each pupil to find their own voice.

10

In her junior year, while enrolled in an art history class, Scheid saw a slide of a crayon drawing by Michelangelo. It was an epiphany. She saw an aliveness in this graphic work that the master’s paintings—though obviously refined—lacked. From this encounter Scheid concluded that it was the directness of drawing—the immediate “give back” of results from the coordination of eye, mind, and hand—that would define her artistry from then on.4 Edgecliff was situated adjacent to Eden Park, a 200-acre public green space overlooking a wide bend of the Ohio River.

(Conveniently, it was also the site of the Cincinnati Art Museum.)

With its tended gardens and water features, Eden Park frequently served as a source of inspiration for Scheid who found she needed to get out of the classroom and into the living environment and its seasons to spur her creativity. She admits to a brief infatuation with the landscape studies and paintings of J.M.W. Turner (1775– 1851), the British Romantic artist known for his dramatic skies and atmospheric pyrotechnics. But if Turner exploited the optical sensations afforded by observing the natural world, Scheid desired to portray the impact upon her of its animating spirit, spurring a keen desire to express the wildness and wonder she found in nature.

The spiritual in modern and contemporary art in the West is still little understood by the art public, much less by many critics, art historians and curators, and this despite its origins in European Symbolism 130 years ago.5 The nature of the spiritual informing Symbolist art most often was not dependent upon traditional religious iconography or orthodoxy, though it did appropriate and re-interpret them along new lines of thought.6 The sensibilities peculiar to the artist and his locale were also factors. Since the late 19th Century, a number of artists have gone beyond the mere rendering of sensation (Impressionism) or idealizing (Romanticism) their landscape work, instead infusing them with an otherworldly and dynamic radiance. Vincent Van Gogh’s (1853–1890) ink drawing, Cypresses (1889) is an early effusion of this sensibility.7 With Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) explorations of spirituality in abstract forms and symbolic colors ca. 1910, artists in Europe and the US were inspired to go even farther afield from naturalism in landscape art.8 Often informed by mystical texts and ideas, these early 20th Century artists devised non-natural or abstract signs and symbols to portray, if not the holy, then the ineffable—the ultimate realities that underlay the observable world of nature.9 More recently, spiritual art done today tends

11

Women Make by Water, 1989

to combine representational and abstract forms to induce in the viewer an attitude of contemplation, communion and awe—as well as an awakening of mythic consciousness.10 Such sensibilities are found in Scheid’s landscapes from the 1970s and 80s in which she attempted to portray her experiences of joy and wonder upon contemplation of the natural world. She has said this was nurtured by her upbringing in an environment of devotional Catholicism. In her youth she heard Gregorian chant and sang in the chorus for Mozart’s Requiem Mass. But it was a momentous personal experience in nature that most strongly connected her to the realm of the spirit, with implications for her art.

As a child of seven, she recalls running with abandon up a hill to suddenly encounter hundreds of blossoming lilies. This epiphany stopped her in her tracks. Elated, Scheid did not seek words to “explain” the experience. Her elation came from this early intuition that her being and the efflorescent slope were linked in some profound way.

Rare among undergraduate art students completing their coursework, Scheid left Edgecliff with an artistic focus, located a studio in Cincinnati, and began working in earnest.11 Among her earliest landscapes is a drawing in subdued tones, Beckoning Highlands, from 1979; it was included in her first professional one-person exhibition.

This work is less a depiction of a trail through the hill country, than a registering of Scheid’s spiritual connectivity with the wintry vista and the portentous gloom of the dark knolls beyond.12 In 1980, Scheid moved to Dubuque, Iowa, and set up a studio there. Bedrock Boogie Woogie, a pastel on paper from 1980, is a severe abstraction of a quarry the artist

12

Beckoning Highlands, 1979 Not in Exhibition

was fond of visiting. The work strikes me as a drawn painting and its coarse facture bears a resemblance to Richard Diebenkorn’s (1922–1993) work when he was moving from abstraction to representation. Two years later, in another pastel drawing with a similar palette, Calliope Blues, Scheid produced a flickeringly expressionistic response to the Iowa hills, rendering them as translucent and overlapping diagonals, triangles, and peaks. Despite its planar complexity, there is a merging oneness to the image, achieved largely through the artist limiting her color scheme and deploying it across the entire surface of the sheet.

Scheid’s last landscape works in Iowa were done in 1987 and 1988. They are visionary representations of the clusters of lotuses that grew in the shallows of the Mississippi River (page 6). In these and Calliope Blues, there is a rising mystical focus in her work, reflecting Scheid’s spiritual quest and taking up meditational practice.

Body: Beginnings After 12 years of professional work reconnoitering the possibilities of the landscape genre, Scheid felt she had reached a crossroads in her art. No small part of her disquiet came from a lack of artistic peers and colleagues that—post Edgecliff— proved few and far between in Cincinnati and Dubuque. Scheid desperately recognized that in order for her visionary, aspirational art to maintain its edge, she required serious critical feedback from a community of artists. Ten years after earning her undergraduate degree, a time during which she maintained a studio discipline and worked as a graphic designer of textbooks, she concluded a career change was necessary.

13

Calliope Blues, 1982 Not in Exhibition

As a first step, Scheid determined to open up a new direction in her art, growing from the realization that she wanted to explore the spiritual dimensions of the human figure. To attain a higher level of practice, as well as a community in which to nurture her ambitions, she applied to and was accepted at a number of MFA programs in the US. Ironically, she found the University of Cincinnati her best option. Recognizing Scheid’s maturity, discipline, commitment, and exhibition record, the University offered her a generous scholarship and a guaranteed teaching assistant position—a package too good to turn down. (What did I earlier say about thriving creatively in one’s hometown?) As a 33 year-old graduate student, Scheid soon found her colleagues within the art faculty, but not among her less-committed fellow students. To her delight, she discovered that the drawing professor Diane Olivier (now at San Francisco City College) worked in large formats, a direction that Scheid wished to explore. The two developed a peer relationship that continues today.

In addition, her expectations for Cincinnati’s MFA program were exceeded when, following graduation, she immediately was hired as an adjunct professor to teach undergraduate drawing classes. This experience led Scheid to realize that she enjoyed teaching and could profitably integrate academia into her studio practice.

While studying and teaching at the University, she continued to work in color pastel, exploring the spiritual and mythic dimensions of the figure. A drawing from 1989, Women Make by Water (page 11), is a somber, sketchy image in dense blues, blacks, and greens overlain with a white delineation of a female form. Hands extended, a robed woman—an apparition?—seems to rise from a pool, disturbing the water. Her grim visage recalls the masks employed in classical Greek drama. The spirituality conveyed in the image suggests a cross between the uncanny and the numinous, German theologian Rudolf Otto’s theory of the holy. For Otto, the numinous was an unfathomable mystery that is terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time.13 In this regard, Women Make by Water arcs back to an ethereal and unsettling mythic sensibility found in the works of two fin-de-siècle Symbolist artists: Jeanne Jacquemin (1863–1938) and Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921).14 In the wake of graduate school and positive feedback for her teaching in Cincinnati, Scheid strategized a campaign to secure an academic post solely devoted to drawing. Ruling out large urban zones and culturally provincial regions, Scheid sought out schools in mid-sized cities that were near natural areas and also convenient to major art centers. Fresno, with its 45-minute commute to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and a half day’s drive to the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles, appealed to her when she saw the

14

Untitled from Threshold of the Visible, 1997 Not in Exhibition

announcement for the drawing instructor position at Fresno City College in 1991.

Her candidacy impressed the search committee, and Scheid was recruited to oversee drawing instruction at the College where she taught for 24 years, retiring in 2015.

In the same year she was hired, Scheid showed her figure drawings in ArtSpace, the campus gallery. In the classroom she taught traditional practice—requiring students to draw from still-life arrangements, the nude figure, and the natural landscape. But she also encouraged them to develop an expanded vision, both of drawing and its presentation possibilities. Scheid reiterated to her students that conceiving and showing one’s drawings can be more than simply displaying a single matted, glazed, and framed work on paper, or tacking a discrete sketching sheet to the wall.

In 1994, Scheid had the opportunity to demonstrate her ideas for a greater drawing practice. She designed a site-specific installation/environment/exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum, A Step in the Dark.15 Laying out an enclosed viewing space, Scheid had two of the walls painted a deep subdued red. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer encountered a long white wall of “falling” figures (page 37). These were drawn on translucent waxed paper and layered three deep. The effect was a corridor of light, a glowing atmosphere that held her figures—seemingly near and distant, in and out of focus, because of the overlaid presentation. Leaving the corridor, the viewer experienced a color shift. In powder white tempera and arrayed along the first red wall, she limned a series of female figures in various positions—standing, turning, bending, crouching. Traversing this wall the viewer came upon a large, luminously white upright cylinder, or “spiral,” upon which were drawn in charcoal numerous male and female figures, falling/floating head down. Passing through the spiral, the installation culminated at the second red wall upon which Scheid drew a white atmospheric mist—symbolic of an ocean wherein many bodies are swimming through the vast “pool of life.” For the viewer, A Step in the Dark became a spiritual journey, akin to exploring a cavern of the unconscious where dreams and memories are manifest as positive (black on white) and negative (white on red) figures.

Two years after A Step in the Dark, Scheid continued to exploit the possibilities in the layering of luminous and translucent waxed papers. In four vertical single sheet drawings christened The Threshold of the Visible, they marked her first foray into abstraction (opposite). This series was made of various sections cut from larger landscapes she drew from her imagination. These were rearranged as collage, the original “cut-and-paste” application, allowing an artist to interrupt or disrupt our notions of a seamless unity in an image. By creating abrupt juxtapositions of disparate imagery, collage introduces a shifting visuality—disordering and reordering, cobbling together a new whole from various parts.

In a departure from her monochromatic drawing practice, Scheid returned to color in Flowers (page 17), four drawings in pastel from 1997 and 1998. These were done intuitively with little or no preparatory studies. They strike me as icons to facilitate silent meditation, that is, the flowers are images we look through, not at, to enter the Deeper Reality. Similarly, Scheid says she views them as offering the viewer the

15

promise of enlightenment, attaining that moment of seeing a subject at its fullest. In Hinduism, this is seeing with the “single Eye” (God’s Eye, the Eye of the One Self, or the “Seat of Enlightenment”—the Agya), a precious interval where the life force/spirit and matter converge.

Body/Land Immediately following the Flowers series, Scheid conceived one of the most ambitious works of her career, and her first major piece to propose a complementary and connective relationship between the human body and the land: Energy Is The Body.16 Produced in 1998 as a total environment, Energy was dominated by a pair of charcoal murals that were drawn directly on the walls of Gallery 25, a cooperative exhibition space in downtown Fresno. The artist credits the idea for drawing on the walls of the exhibition space to seeing a film of the American artist Jim Dine doing the same in Germany in 1995.17 On one wall measuring 40 feet in length, the artist drew

16

Energy is the Body, 1998

two gargantuan male figures holding a yogic double-knee press, pavanamuktasana, while hovering in space. On a second wall measuring 35 feet in length, Scheid sketched side by side two monumental landscapes of low hills and a stream bed.

To disrupt the viewer’s habit of reading these images as pictorial views, she applied three 6-by-3 foot drawings of individual human figures, male and female, onto the mural—another form of collage. Obliquely, Scheid implied that while the Earth may be the theatre for human life and action, humanity nonetheless remains a vulnerable and transient presence within the great geophysical cycles of nature.

Desiring to add another dimension to Energy Is The Body, Scheid invited four dancers to carry out four separate dances that they choreographed in response to the murals—gamboling bodies activating drawn bodies, and vice versa. This performance was a public event and was filmed.

Energy Is The Body is a prime example of the wider options afforded by the “expanded field” proclaimed by postmodern theorists and artists in the late 20th Century. In this “anything is possible” environment, previous strictures circumscribing what was artistically acceptable collapsed.18 Risk-taking artists broadened the scope of their endeavors while also exposing themselves to failure, the downside of breaking barriers. For those trained in mastering traditional skills, drawing no longer had to be performed upon standard-sized sheets of paper, framed for display on a section of wall—a polite and tamed aesthetic presence. Indeed, as Scheid realized with Energy Is The Body, drawing could become—define, even—the entire space, an environment where monumentally drawn figures and actual dancers could dynamically cohabit.

In the same year, Scheid participated in a Fresno group show called Origins. For this outing she produced a series of single and diptych drawings using color pastels, virtually suffusing them with dense and rich color. Dubbing this small cluster of work The Body as Source, the artist viewed her venture as a “fishing expedition,” with Scheid as the “angler” trying to catch the intangible but manifest life force or energy that

17

Wind of My Brother from Flowers, 1997

humans emit by dint of their existence and interactions with others.

A work from this series, Transcendental Transcript, is a diptych hued in dusky violet. Here the drawing attempts to serve as a visual record of the non-material spirit that the artist experiences in her encounters with others. The largely obscured figure in the right half of the diptych exists in a field where charged irregular lines in black, red, and orange register as vital “transcriptions” from another realm. Scheid selectively used only a few realistically rendered natural images in Transcendental Transcript, including—most prominently—a solitary leaf. The delicate deployment of these elements suggests that the spirit animating humanity is the same one vivifying the natural world.

Since receiving her MFA at the University of Cincinnati, the mystery and meaning of human embodiment has driven Scheid’s spiritual practice and her art. She pursues this endeavor amidst mainstream American culture and its confusion about the human body, mainly its promoting of a constricted and artificial physical beauty that serves commercial purposes. That the body might be more deeply understood as the enfleshed house of the soul, the carrier of our psychic energy, a vital husk wherein consciousness dwells—and from which meaningful action springs—finds too few adherents.19 As a draughtsman who limns the human figure with frequency, Scheid decided to explore a more comprehensive visualization/conceptualization of the body. To this end, she undertook a series of six charcoal drawings in 2000, Trinity of the Self, a narrative that explored the inter-related structures of the female psyche in physical form. As a concept, the artist devised a trio of dramatis personae that appear in each drawing, staging her three symbolic women in triangular relationship. At top appears a figure cloaked in darkness and shadow that Scheid characterized as “experienced, unpredictable,” an “unbound creature” capable of travel “to times past and forward to times future,” the incarnation of “non-local mind.”20 Appearing at lower right is an unworldly white-robed female that Scheid identifies as spirit whose attributes are grace, beauty, and generosity.21 The third female, lower left, always appears nude. This signifies her physicality, her vulnerability to “struggle, suffering, deterioration, and death.” As such, she is flesh.22 In the second drawing of the series, Trinity of the Self #2 (opposite), all three figures direct either their gaze or movement to the right, suggesting an integrated focus of the three psychic states. Noteworthy, the personification of flesh rises, extends her

18

Transendental Transcript from Origins, 1998 Not in Exhibition

arms and spreads her fingers, a gesture of momentary enlightenment.

Scheid likes to describe Trinity of the Self as a sort of psychological opera (albeit without a musical score). When all six works are viewed from left to right, they appear as staged sequences in a narrative tableau, recalling Giotto’s fresco cycles painted in 1305 in the Arena Chapel of Padua.

A year later, Scheid was invited to participate in a four-person exhibition at the El Camino College Art Gallery in Torrance (Southern California). Titled Shades of Gray: Four Approaches to Drawing (page 8), Scheid was given a 52-foot-long wall upon which she drew a vast graphic mural, Women Make By Water, recycling a title from her 1989 Cincinnati drawing. Similar in aspiration to Energy Is The Body (1998), the Torrance mural is an environment inspired by the natural world—in this instance the boulder-strewn Sierra Nevada foothills cleaved by surging, plunging cascades gathering momentum from higher elevations.

In this work of composite artistry, the artist conflated five rivers across the expanse, creating a “widescreen” environment. Scheid’s trademark vigorous charcoal line suited her massive subject, striking the viewer “like a visual battering ram;” Women Make By Water is no bucolic and unified panorama—long a reliable formula for large landscape art.23 Instead the artist limned her natural settings by making brute shifts of locales and abutting them.24 Further, in an approach similar to her earlier and more modestly scaled A Step in the Dark, Scheid suspended three sheets of luminous figure drawings in front of her terrain. Sketched in powdered graphite on shimmering vellum, these mysterious “hovering collages” further interrupted the jarring landscape, counter-posing a calming spirituality to nature’s aqueous tumult.25 Although vertically displayed, we curiously experience the figures from the perspective of gazing down into a pool. Scheid says she wanted them to appear “engulfed in water,” suggesting baptism, ritual cleansing, or a transition to an altered or higher state. Conceptually, the restful ghostly figures are a confounding presence, and certainly no rational compositional device. This means the artist is here taking a risk—another step in the dark, if you will, implying that somehow, through a deeper contemplation, there is a connection of our bodies (embodied spirits) with the natural realm in all its

19

Trinity of the Self II, 2000

wildness. Such a direction roots Scheid’s art in the essential character of all things in our world, an artistic quest in touch with Nature and the depths of our human nature—both ultimately unfathomable beyond conventional intellectual means.

Natural environments—monumentally envisioned—continued to fire Scheid’s interest in depicting the landscape. The Mound Project (2003) commenced a year after the artist happened to drive through one of the vast fruit orchards that carpet the Central Valley. She was horrified to come upon one section where row after row of plum trees were being brutally uprooted by Caterpillar bulldozers.26 Scattered across the field, their skeins of roots thrust skyward, this destruction of arboreal fecundity struck Scheid as an opportunity to explore nature as Armageddon—a subject previously unthinkable to her. Returning to the site with her friend, the Fresno artist Stephanie Ryan, the two made numerous small studies of the ruined groves.27

20

The Mound Project, 2003

After a year of reflecting upon these drawings and what the demolition of the orchard symbolized to her, Scheid conceived of another large-scale installation for Gallery 25 (see cover). Again working with Ryan, they drew with charcoal upon the gallery walls full-length, as well as piecing together drawings on sheets of waxed paper to create screens. (The screens also gave the artist control over the space; they curtained off the gallery’s offices so they would not distract viewers from the installation.) Just inside the street entrance, Scheid and Ryan made a mound of their study drawings (more than 50, each measuring four by four inches), a miniature recreation of the piled trees. Beyond, the viewer entered an overpoweringly ominous world, a broad and dreadful landscape that might be the agricultural equivalent of the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s vision of Hell, Inferno, from the Commedia Divina— especially the disorienting, tangled “dark wood” that opens the First Canto.

As with the earlier Energy is the Body, Scheid arranged for a dance performance that interacted with the drawings. On the closing day of The Mound Project, three dancers dressed in bright yellow sweat suits—the trademark color of Caterpillar bulldozers— symbolically erased (destroying the destroyed trees) the drawings from the walls.

Among the many visitors who were electrified by the The Mound Project was Jacquelin Pilar, curator at the Fresno Art Museum. Pilar requested Scheid bring the project to the Museum in a different configuration in 2005. As the artist was continuing her engagement with the subject—discovering more orchard demolitions and finding new ways to image them—she was pleased to find a second venue. The charcoal and pastel drawings Scheid produced up to the time of the Museum presentation she named the Witness Series, since “witnessing” and recording the demise of the orchards required her on-site presence. Thus Scheid affirmed that the human body in the devastated land was hers—a physical incarnation walking the site, contemplating and drawing the ruins.28

The Ancient, 2005

21

In my view, the most compelling work in the Witness Series is The Ancient (page 21), a pastel on paper measuring 80 by 100 inches. It portrays two adjacent tree trunks against a smoky haze. The angular trunks surmount what appears to be a golden altar, and the vertical forms resemble the Hebrew letter tet, a text/image suggesting Kabbalah, a body of mystical Jewish literature. A mega-icon, The Ancient is a mystical apparition and seems to be simultaneously charged with warning and hope. As such it shares a grandeur of symbolic vision with the late 20th Century work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer (see footnote 10).

Scheid’s focusing on man’s destruction of agriculture in The Mound Project and Witness took up four years of her career. Perhaps to heal her artist’s eyes, she began making drawing forays into the Sierra and Yosemite National Park, barely an hour’s distance from her home. She chose sites where nature could be experienced unsullied by human intervention: Bridal Veil Falls, the San Joaquin River, and Lewis Creek in the Sierra foothills. There she would make numerous brisk and expressive drawings of the vistas before her, responding intuitively with charcoal and pastel, returning home with a stack of images by late afternoon.

But Scheid’s real work began in her studio. Rather than being ends in themselves, the drawings were destined to become grist for her art mill to realize a long-desired goal: the integration of the human form with nature. Her 2000 mural, Women Make by Water, took a stab at this, but her solution then was to suspend a sequence of separately drawn sheets of water-borne figures over the landscape. While intriguing, this did not fully accomplish the integration of the two subjects. In 2007, however, Scheid found a solution combining the technical process of collage and a physical application of deconstruction theory, arriving at a “deconstructivist” process that “force-fused” the figure onto a landscape that was itself assembled from sectional views of terrain.29 She did two groups of work in this series that she called Earthbody.30 To portray this fragmented sense of nature, that is, something of the piecemeal experience humans have when standing in the vastness of nature, Scheid randomly cut portions from her landscape drawings, re-constituting via intuitive association a new whole from the diverse parts. Her next step entailed working with a studio model, collaborating with the model to choreograph (Scheid says she did not “pose” her models) the right position of the body for being drawn onto the collage. The artist then used the same media to sketch the figure that she did for drawing the landscapes (page 23, 34, and 42).

Scheid says her approach to the land in Earthbody is similar to that of the late poet Seamus Heaney who saw the natural landscape as sacramental, to be read as a kind of mysterious holy text, cryptically declaring “Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic.”31 What Heaney did with words, Scheid accomplished with drawing and collage.

As Scheid gained experience working in large and non-traditional formats, so did her willingness to take on more challenging projects. In 2009, via her involvement

22

with the California Contemporary Art Collective, she leapt at the opportunity to produce a site-specific public art piece in two expanses of street level windows at Warnors Theatre, a historic landmark in downtown Fresno.32 For the eight windows on Tuolumne Street (9 by 28 feet), Scheid painted in coarse black strokes a recumbent figure over which she roughly sketched a rising figure in scarlet. For the Fulton Street bank of windows, the artist—working in black, grays and white—collaged a quasi-cubist figure propping itself on one elbow and crossing its legs (9 by 21 feet).

Ironically titled The Safety of Constraint (page 24), the works address conformity and the societal constrictions on human beings. In both images, movement is severely limited. Using large sheets of paper, Scheid drew her bodies upon them in sections, aligning the multiple sheets on the floor as the work progressed. The artist found that, in contrast to Earthbody, where the body was part of the landscape, in the The Safety of Constraint the landscape became embedded in the body.

The years 2009 and 2010 saw Scheid returning to the Sierra, transporting heavy sheets of watercolor paper measuring 108 (!) inches in length. This time water played a more active role in her work. In addition to soaking the paper, she laid the sheet on a large flat rock and splashed ink upon it, followed by casting debris from the forest floor upon the surface. Back in her studio she stretched the moist paper upon a frame to achieve a consistency in size for the series that she would call Body

23

Embodied Maelstrom (San Joaquin River) from Earthbody, 2006

Water. Lastly, Scheid would draw in ink a single figure upon each sheet, uniting the creek-imprinted picture plane with the human form. One source of inspiration for this series came from an observation by the late Los Angeles dance and movement trainer Emile Conrad Da’oud: “Water is the source of all life, life’s matrix and fecundity; it overflows into everything, it moves everywhere. We [humans] are fundamentally water: muscled water.”33 Her work on Body Water led Scheid to distill her ideas in three concurrent, differently formatted series: The Listener (page 46), Water House (page 44), and Body Water (page 45).

Another opportunity to exhibit arose in 2012 when Scheid was invited to participate with her six colleagues in the California Contemporary Art Collective at the Fresno Art Museum. Titled Edges: an investigation, the exhibition was curated for the Collective

by Kathryn Funk.34 Desiring to advance her work of examining the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world, Scheid decided upon an approach that loosely linked certain traits of the Hindu goddess Kali and Western archetypes as identified by the psychologist Carl Jung—an ambitiously hybrid experiment.35 To this end, she conceived of a monumental quadriptych, The Four Arms of Kali (page 26 and 27); the title alludes to the iconography of Kali’s four arms, though these were not overtly depicted in Scheid’s final work. Among the figural archetypes she referenced in the four panels were the Visionary, the Poet/Artist, the Trickster, the Hedonist, and the Novice.

Resourcefulness is always an artistic virtue, and Scheid, desiring to abandon the heavy paper sheets of her previous series, rummaged through her studio to resurrect the light-weight 96-inch long translucent charcoal drawings she made 18 years earlier for her installation A Step in the Dark. These depicted isolated falling figures.

Recycling them in 2012, the artist added trees and stream motifs, rendering them in powdered graphite. The result was a series of hazy, mysterious images that the viewer labors to extract from a surface facture that seems more akin to action

24

“The Safety of Constraint” from the The Warnors Window Project, 2009

painting than conventional linear representation. This was the intention of the artist for The Four Arms of Kali: “my figures are implied and [the body’s] edges suggested.

The distinctness of each is lessened and a [sheet] of related marks builds the image of man and nature.” Curator Funk saw in quadriptych an overall effort to “blur—[a] seeking to meld . . . nature and self.”36 Body/Land marks a quarter century of Scheid’s visionary imagery depicting nature, the human body, and eventually, the integration of the two. But the origins of her artistic calling go further back, recalling a moment of joyous enchantment. A 7-yearold girl runs free in the woods and is astonished to encounter a slope bursting with lilies. Instinctively, she received life’s beauteous abundance with glee and gratitude.

It was not that long ago, and less psychically self-buffered, we also could encounter

25

26

The Four Arms of Kali, 2012

27

nature and works of art as the gifts they are, before we crowd other considerations into our perception. Presently and increasingly, we feel a diminishment of our sense of the giftedness inherent in nature and art. I believe the main culprit for this loss is the deepening secularism of our culture, a process now generations long.37 (To be sure, consumerism also bears its share of blame.) Happily, the reductive effects of secularism seem to have little impacted Scheid. Her spirit is un-buffered; she remains vulnerable to enchantment and deeper perception because she has nurtured a contemplative’s engagement with life.

Art historically, Scheid’s career recalls the aspirations of Symbolist poets, musicians, and artists at the close of the 19th Century, a time when materialism was sweeping the West. These pioneering seekers of a Greater Realm, a higher consciousness, ventured beyond the safety of academies and comfortable patronage to chart a new way. Does Scheid’s spiritually attuned artistic quest to unite humankind with the Earth make her a postmodern heir of a Symbolism for our times? Perhaps. Her desire for an integrative understanding of human life and the natural world certainly resonates with the growing realization that we must find an ecological balance with Nature—first, to survive, and second, to flourish as the stewards of our planet.

For the last 25 years, Scheid has been admired for the purity of her artistic commitment, freedom from the art world’s trendiness, indifference to the market’s seductions, and graciousness of her teaching. All these have sustained her career and will continue nourishing her as she gives the fullest measure of her vocation in the years to come. We await her gifts with keen anticipation.

28

Endnotes 6

Paul Gauguin Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ, 1890/91 oil on canvas Musée d’Orsay, Paris

1

2 3

4 5 6 7

Vincent Van Gogh Cypresses, 1889 ink on paper Brooklyn Museum, NY

7 8 9 10

11 8

Wassily Kandinsky Autumn II, 1912 oil & oil washes on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC

12

13

14

10 Anselm Kiefer Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1981 mixed media on canvas private collection

15 16

17 18 19

20

14 Jeanne Jacquemin Woman of Sorrow and Crown of Glory, 1892 color pastel on paper private collection

29

Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 2002), is a solid account of how Modern Art became codified or official, emanating from its hegemonic “capital,” MOMA. Among the first sustained critiques of persisting (yet collapsing) Modernist notions of “inevitable newness” was Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York & London: Thames & Hudson, 1984). For an overall consideration and advocacy for new cultural efforts in the passing of Modernism, see Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism?, 3rd edition (London & New York: Academy Editions & St. Martin’s Press: 1989).

Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), is an engaging summary of this period from the perspective of an art historian who was a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists.

Gablik in Has Modernism Failed? precedes her text with this observation from Lewis Hyde: “A work of art is a gift, not a commodity. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves [i.e. to the viewer and the collector of the work], how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values . . . ?”

Scheid says she never had strong feelings for color, paints, brushes or the rigmarole of painting. Pausing to mix colors removed the immediacy of her primary expression. Most of her classmates were painters.

Among its pioneers were Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, Ferdinand Hodler, Frantisek Kupka, Gustave Moreau, Alphonse Osbert, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, to name a few of the better known artists. See Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Icon Editions, 1998).

An example of this tendency is Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ. It uniquely conflates the suffering artist with the crucified Jesus, as depicted in a large crucifix that Gauguin encountered in a Breton church.

Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, NYC. A veritable land/dreamscape, Kandinsky’s Autumn II is one of his earlier “spiritualized” expressions that are drawn from sensations he experienced in his contemplation of the natural world.

Maurice Tuchman, et al, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (Los Angeles & New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Abbeville Press, 1986).

If I had to pick a single examplar of a postmodern landscape-based spiritual work combining abstraction and representation, consider Anselm Kiefer’s Deine goldenes Haar, Margaret (Your Golden Hair, Margarete), mixed media work from 1981. It sketchily depicts a wintry, blackened landscape of plowed earth to which is applied a tumble of straw. The work is a meditation on 20th century German history and culture, and is based upon a poem by Paul Celan (1920–1970), a German-speaking Romanian Jew who endured forced labor when his country was occupied by the Nazis.

Scheid credits Prof. Beiersdorfer with inspiriational mentoring. It was not unusual for students to receive one-hour critiques of single works—crucial feedback for developing one’s own artistic voice.

On the surface, Scheid’s late 1970s and early 1980s work from the Midwest seem to echo the stark Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, landscapes of Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). In a telephone conversation with the author, November 20, 2015, Scheid acknowledges hearing these observations during her career. She points out the Wyeth’s paintings are about specific places while hers are an emotional response to a momentary encounter with the land.

Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J.W. Harvey (Eastford, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010) is a reprint of the 1923 English edition. Copyright free, this text is also available via Kindle. The Idea of the Holy influenced a number of 20th century thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Carl Jung.

Jacquemin and Khnopff participated in the Rose + Croix Salon, Paris, a neo-medieval occult “order” that was a center of Symbolist art events. The Salon attracted poets, musicians and visual artists. Similar to Scheid, Jacquemin worked in color pastel. Her work is distinctive for its placing ethereal religious characters amidst Art Nouveau-style botanical life. http://www.annescheid.com/wall-drawings/a-step-in-the-dark/ http://www.annescheid.com/wall-drawings/energy-is-the-body/ The “energy” associated with “the body” in the exhibition title refers to chakras, the seven life-force energy centers that – according to Hinduism – exist in the “subtle etheric body” of human beings, i.e. the non-material energetic counterpart (spirit) to our physical body. In this understanding there are seven main chakras located along the spine.

When Energy Is The Body closed, Anne and her colleagues ceremonially wiped down and painted over the expansive drawings, while Mozart’s Requiem played on a boom box.

Nancy Dine & Richard Stilwell, Jim Dine: A Self-Portrait on the Walls, directed by Nancy Dine. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Media LLC, 1995.

Sandler, pp. 1 -21, does yeoman service in sorting out the transition from Modernism to a more fluid postmodern sensibility, including the major cultural and theoretical debates that marked the late 20th Century art world.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Female Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991) critiques the manipulative commercialization of the female body. See also Gordon Patzer, Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined (New York: AMACOM, 2008). Art historically and attuned to critical theory, Nicholas Mirzoff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), offers a late 20th century perspective. For an exalted, capital “C” conservative, theological/phenomenological treatise on the meaning of human embodiment, there always is St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006). I could continue listing sources on this charged subject!

Artist’s statement, Trinity of the Self, 2000. “Non-local mind” for Scheid is the supernatural capacity for time travel, suggesting an unbound consciousness. http://www.annescheid.com/drawings/trinity-of-the-self/

21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

30 31

32 33

34

35 36 37

30

Ibid.

Ibid. http://www.annescheid.com/wall-drawings/shades-of-grey/ Suvan Geer, “Shades of Gray at El Camino College,” ArtWeek, November 2001. Critic Geer observed Scheid’s desire to portray “nature as an overwhelming visual force in the tradition of [the 19th century painter Albert] Bierstadt, but rendered in the immediacy and physicality of raw charcoal line scrawled on a wall.”

Geer, Ibid., faulted Scheid for interrupting the assembled terrain(s) with the three figures, betraying the critic’s comfort with a more traditional – and static – notion of landscape scenography in art.

Scheid recalled her first encounter: “I stopped my car and got out to walk among these giants. The brutally broken bodies of the trees were everywhere and the evidence of the violence it took to create this scene was fresh. In the twilight these monoliths mirrored the grandeur and power of the distant Sierra. Feelings of sadness and horror mixed with awe at nature’s continuous beauty. I savored this encounter with the sublime, but this is a terrible beauty.” http://www.annescheid.com/drawings/witness/artist-statementwitness.

As Scheid and Ryan sketched their impressions, the owner of the orchard happened by and expressed curiosity about their work. It was then that Scheid learned the plum trees were being destroyed—despite their high yield of succulent fruit—because shifts in the global agricultural market had lessened the demand and they ceased being profitable to the grower.

In addition, the Fresno Art Museum’s resident composer, Armen Nalbandian, was so inspired by the Gallery 25 installation that he composed a symphony, “Witness Suite,” for ten 10 musicians. It debuted at the museum’s Bonner Auditorium during the run of the exhibition in 2006.

I am not referring to deconstruction theory as developed by literary critics and academics for the study of literature. Rather, I am applying “deconstructivism” as it is understood in postmodern architecture. In so doing, it offers a fairly close sense of what Scheid is after in the Earthbody series. Note my insertions in brackets where I join the concept to Scheid’s drawings: “Deconstructivism …… is influenced by the theory of “Deconstruction,” which is a form of semiotic analysis [applied to visual objects and signs]. It is characterized by fragmentation, an interest in manipulating a structure’s [an image’s] surface, skin, and non-rectilinear shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture [the overall image], such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings [works of visual art] that exhibit deconstructivist “styles” is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos.” https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivism.

For a critical response, see Donald Munro, “Anne Scheid: Scheid Impresses With Her Body of Work,” Fresno Bee, September 24, 2007, and http://www.annescheid.com/publication/anne-scheid-scheid-impresseswith-her-body-of-work/ http://www.annescheid.com/drawings/earthbody-series-i/earthbody-artist-statement/ Semiotics is the theory of signs, and in art the work points to something other than what is literally before our eyes. Poet Heaney mediates and writes about what prompts meaning for him in the landscape he encounters.

Similarly, Scheid subconsciously absorbs or gains insights to particular elements in the landscape that hold spiritual signification for her. In turn, her drawings distill her experiences, and they “signify” to the viewer who engages them. In other words, her drawings are not pure replications of the natural world or the human body, but what they together mean on a deeper level when combined. Here is Scheid on her process and what her drawings ultimately distill/signify: “Sometimes I am aware of feeling scared, sometimes excited; always, in my body there is sensation and a desire to respond [deeply to Nature].

Here beside the ancient [Earth], revelations rise and a quiet knowing grows slowly. I carry away a sense of human vulnerability, scale, and mortality and a small swallow of insight regarding the complex, changing symbiosis between humanity and the earth. Today the earth, as a subject in art, is relevant, urgent and timely. [My art] is a gesture for change and hope.” http://www.annescheid.com/drawings/warnors-theatre-project/ http://www.annescheid.com/drawings/about/artist-statement-body-water/. On the meaning of water for Scheid: “Waters are associated with the continual flux of life, with the unconscious, forgetfulness; waters dissolve, purify, wash away and regenerate. The liquidity of ink represents the properties of water. It runs, drips, bleeds, and stains. Water finds a path around anything, its transparent fluidity absorbing and eroding.” The Los Angeles-based Emilie Conrad Da’oud (1934–2014) was a dancer and leader of workshops in physical fitness and Somatics, a “movement discipline” that advocates a practice of fluid, primary movement for human wellbeing.

In addition to Scheid, participating artists included DonnaLee Dunne, Juliana Harris, Linda Koch, Trude McDermott, Joan K. Sharma and Robert Weibel. These individuals constitute the California Contemporary Art Collective, a group local artists who seek greater opportunities to connect their work with the area public. http://edges.californiacontemporaryartcollective.com/ Kali, who has an ancient and multivalent history across Hindu cultures, is associated with empowerment, or shakti, an attribute important to Scheid as a female artist. In addition, Kali is variously understood to have power over Time, Change, Power, Creation, Preservation, and Destruction. http://edges.californiacontemporaryartcollective.com/curatorial%20statement.html Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007). James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids & Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2014) offers a condensed overview of Taylor’s massive study, as well as evidence of “the malaise of immanence” he finds in works of contemporary literature and the lyrics of alternative rock bands.

Circulatory Movements of Life from Water Body, 2009

31

32

Transfigure IV, 2004

33

Transfigure I, 2004

34

The Watercourse Way (Bridal Veil Falls) from Earthbody, 2006

h a z e l a n ta r a M i a n h o F M a n

Interview with anne Scheid

Anne, I’m in your studio and quite taken by the powerful gestural expressiveness of your drawings. How do you begin? —Gesture is the way I begin. It is a way to warm up, to shift gears, and put aside outside distractions. Gestural exercises get the creative energy moving. It involves drawing something living. It could be a person; it could be an animal; it could be a tree; and so I begin warming up my body and getting my attention focused. Once this occurs, the connection happens with the living subject that I’m drawing. This active gesture is part of a connectivity that manifests physically in my body and presents itself on the surface of the paper. What I’m trying to capture is the life of my subject, that is, the living quality. It’s not about detail or proportions. In the process of gesturing I can work fast and in doing so, the drawing develops quickly. In another way, gesture also refers to the quality of life present in a work of art. It is this animated character that I strive for in my work.

In the May 2007 issue of The Artist’s Magazine, Maureen Bloomfield wrote a nice piece about you and your drawings. She titled it, “Unfinished Because Unfolding,” which I found to be an ingenious way to speak about your work. Tell me how drawings as studies and as works of art unto themselves speak to your way of thinking about what may appear to some viewers as unfinished work. —Since graduate school, I’ve been confronted with the criticism, “Well, your drawings aren’t finished.” Since I work intuitively, I’m not always coming from my rational mind, that is, the left brain. The idea of “being finished” doesn’t resonate with me. I’m thinking about the work subjectively, not whether it is complete. As I draw, there is an internal giveand-take, and as the image develops, this process requires my total concentration.

Gradually, the back-and-forth dialogue with my work slows and finally ends. It is at this point that I can see the work objectively. This is still a process that I use and trust. Another way I can respond is to speak to my intention as I begin my process.

Life, movement and change are persistent themes in my work. I’m not interested in merely representing form or the “finished shape” of my subject. My understanding that nothing is static in life is what fascinates me. It is both the gestural aspects and movement of my subject that is critical to my sensibilities. I am trying to capture the

35

way the thing is in this moment in time, as well as how it’s going to be in the next moment, which is a dynamic quality. It is my conviction that life itself is embedded in the final drawing.

So you’re interested in the change of things, that is, change that implies movement as in moments of time, rather than change that implies your physical or psychological perspective? —Paul Klee talks about the “genesis” of image-making, and I recently discovered his concept. Nature, observes Klee, is in constant flux, never culminating in a “finished product.”1 There isn’t anything in this world, even things that change slowly like a mountain, that doesn’t undergo some change—everything changes. The strange thing about art is that the final image does seem to freeze things. But I’m not interested in freezing the ”thing”; I’m trying to capture the vibrational lifelike quality of my subject, a past that once had a different form and its forward-moving presence in the next moment. The open areas in my drawings are just that, open—open to breathe, open to change, and open as escape.

What interests have sparked your visual work? —In college I was asked to solve a visual problem. Left to my own devices, questions swirled in my head: “What do you do? Where do you go?” My immediate response was to leave the studio and the building and to go out into nature. The source for my visual work took me back to the woods of my childhood. To me that experience, as well as the actual place, was enormous. As a young child the woods were a place to play; they were both beautiful and terrible. When there, I was engulfed totally—absorbed into its presence.

Where was this? —Cincinnati, Ohio. These woods are a sort of unique habitat that doesn’t exist in California’s Central Valley. Here, landscape has a grand scale, like in Yosemite. The scale of woods is much more intimate in the East: It is always made of trees and always has a creek running through it. There are well-worn paths where people walk. There are old trees, young trees, and lots of brambly bushes. It is full of beauty; it also seems full of danger.

This reminds me of Max Ernst’s description of the woods in Germany. It was in an analysis of his 1927 work Forest and Dove where the Tate Modern stated that the forest image represented the forest near Ernst’s childhood home, which inspired a sense of ”enchantment and terror” in the artist. —I relate to Ernst’s experience. I frequently would go into the woods alone when I was a little girl, around 5 or 6 years old, and just play and explore. I was comforted there, and it truly was an amazing place. Now looking back, it was a place where I felt something more—more than just the woods. Somehow I felt connected to something bigger than me. The things that happened there, that I saw as a child, transported me. I suppose I thought of myself as sensitively aware of things, a little like a budding transcendentalist. In those woods there was something mysterious and bigger than me—a spirit, life, God. You might say that these early experiences were the primary sources that have stayed with me and continue to direct much of my work.

36

I am fascinated with the dramatic shifts in the scale of your work. In 1994, you created on a monumental scale the installments for A Step in the Dark (above) at the Fresno Art Museum: 35 feet in length, 14 feet high, 18 feet wide. Tell me how you conceived of the idea of drawing figures engaged in their daily common rituals versus the falling figures. —The installation was designed as an environment—something that could be walked into and moved through; it implied a journey. I wanted the viewer to be involved in the work physically. In order to visualize this, I needed a tool that would allow me to plan the path through the space. This involved building a scale model of the gallery. The theme addressed in A Step in the Dark was life, duality, birth and death.

What about the juxtaposition between the physical poses of the figures?

—There were contrasting approaches to the figures. One was drawn on the wall, and the other was drawn on paper. The figures drawn on the deep red walls are standing, doing ordinary things. They were white, opaque, solid, and still. The other figures were drawn on translucent paper that was waxed, which creates a luminous quality.

They were drawn with charcoal and were dark, upside down, and appeared to be falling, coming in or coming down—fragile beings in their movements.

In addition, there was a spiral that the audience could enter. It was formed by the long luminous papers of falling figures. The final wall opposite the spiral had the feel of atmospheric mist—an ethereal environment—in which bodies were freely moving through life as if in a pool of still water.

37

A Step in the Dark, 1994

You invoke dance or body movement not only in the way you work with your models, but also in the way you expand your ideas as you did at Gallery 25’s installation Energy is the Body (page 16), where four dancers interpret your concept through original choreography. —In graduate school, I shifted gears with respect to subject matter and the elements. I felt my work was in a rut and that I needed to take some risks and make changes. Prior to graduate, school I was working with color, landscape, and nature. In graduate school, I began working with the human figure in a black-and-white palette. I found the human body a wonder and a cosmos unto itself. This interested me immensely. I wanted to explore it more.

Why the body? —It seemed so obvious to me. We have physical bodies; they allow us to experience this world. I’m keenly aware of my senses of sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing. They deliver the world to me, like the experience of the first rain after seven months of continuous sun. Inspiration arrives through the senses, and I can then offer appreciation through my work. Our bodies are also vessels of consciousness, and as such they are energy and hold life force. I find much mystery in this, and it informs my interest in not merely representing but in trying to capture what is hidden. I am just beginning to investigate the theory that the physical body is energy and not solid matter.

Is dance and movement intrinsic to your process as well? —Yes, I’m a kinetic learner.

I always knew that I was a visual learner, but being a kinetic leaner was a revelation to me. So if I got stuck or an idea didn’t come to me, it seemed that if I just stood up and moved around, movement would shift my awareness, and the answer was often there.

As I began questioning things in graduate school, I found that the body, movement and dance were the things that opened up a whole new world for me, and it was immensely exciting.

How does it come together for you now, the drawing and the dance? —In the exhibitions Energy is the Body and The Mound Project, each was designed as an environment. I would ask a dancer to participate in the work by responding to the concept, which culminated in a performance in the space. The collaboration was with dancers participating in the ideas and expanding them with movement of their bodies in three-dimensional space.

Do you feel when you are creating a drawing, walking around and looking at it in the round, are you also doing a dance move with it? —Absolutely. The act of making an artwork feels like a dance, moving through the different stages. All parts of the performance, the result of the dance, collapse into the final image. In fact, there was a performance piece that I did in the 2007 Fresno Rogue Festival with Beth Megill called Marking Movements, in which she danced on top of the piece of paper I was drawing on. So as I drew, she interacted with the marks and the material. Music was the inspiration, and the paper captured the performance. We drew and danced together and created several drawings this way.

38

As an artist who draws, making a mark is the most fundamental aspect of your creative expression, perhaps the most elemental form of visual communication.

—Lines for me are a natural way to make a picture. I pick up a piece of charcoal, and I draw with line. Line is simple, humble, and has the potential to become profound.

In college, I absorbed an early lesson from Michelangelo about line. I could feel in his drawings not only the presence of matter—whatever form of the body he was drawing, such as the shoulder, the thigh, the foot, the head—but I could also feel his hand; that was a revelation to me. It was visually thrilling and heightened my interest in drawing.

It also was Rico Lebrun who taught me about line. {Lebrun, 1900–1964, was a California artist for whom drawing was a primary expression.} If Michelangelo’s lines were intensely focused and were asked to hold so much information, Lebrun’s lines radiated passion and feeling for his subject. To me, his lines embodied a kind of freedom and expressive power.

In Bento’s Sketchbook,2 the English critic John Berger talks about the impulse to draw. Since you are an artist whose body of work is in essence a drawing, when did the impulse to draw begin for you? Why drawing? —The awareness of what medium I should choose happened in my undergraduate college years. Every junior art student was asked to choose their area of interest and concentration. My friends went into painting, and I took the other road, drawing. In college, my drawings had color lines.

I didn’t set out to be an artist who draws. It’s only after years of making art that I realized in hindsight that drawing is what I do best.

When you’re working on a drawing, at what point (per Berger) does the ”heap of signs,“ become ”a presence” for you? —Lebrun talks about drawing as wrestling a tiger. He states in his book Drawing3 that the “live image is a tiger.” Here he’s talking about drawing being awake, alive, and dangerous. For me when the drawing finally pushes back at me...in the beginning you’re putting marks on the paper, you’re going along, then, all of a sudden you have done something that causes the image to push against you! When this happens, it’s a startling moment. I wait for it. Up until that point, I try not to get too connected or attached to any particular part until that point when it engages me; then it’s alive, and then the effort is a thrilling ride. This is when the ”heap” of marks becomes a ”real presence.”

In college as an undergraduate, you would carry around a copy of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art4. Why was this book important to you? —You could say that I was a Kandinsky groupie in college. I don’t know that I truly understood all that he was trying to say when I was 19. It didn’t matter. While I couldn’t articulate

39

his concept of inner necessity, I understood on an intuitive level what he was trying to communicate. He saw the spiritual as the emerging theme of the 20th Century, intending to correct the materialism of the 19th Century. He thought that the created image had the power to convey to the viewer a higher vibrational energy, much the way a church or cathedral can lift the spirit of a worshiper. I, too, had lofty aspirations and wanted my artwork to have a higher purpose.

How do you believe this applied to you? —Kandinsky’s writing about art was directed to painting the two-dimensional surface as a field of pure abstraction, and to the subjective use of color. I didn’t fit this prescriptive, but perhaps in my process I did. As an undergraduate I would start with small sketches that I created while looking at a scene in nature. Then I would go to the studio where I would use the sketch as a compositional study and transfer it loosely to my paper. At this point, the best way to describe my process was that I worked intuitively.

So if the intuitive process is a grand part of your work, then are there times when you feel that you are merely a conduit for the expressive work being created in front of you? If I may, are you saying that the energy source of the artistic movements you are experiencing is not emanating from you, but simply going through you?

—Perhaps it was like being a channel, as if opening up to some higher inspiration.

Practically speaking, I would work in a transcendental-like state until the intuitive process gradually dissipated. I then became conscious of the drawing that I had made. One time my college drawing professor Ann Beiersdorfer, came into the studio and interrupted this process by complimenting me on the figure she saw in my drawing. I remember replying: “What figure?” I had not as yet identified the form as a figure. In this way, I felt aligned with Kandinsky’s thought that images emerge by virtue of inner subjective experience.

In On Modern Art, Paul Klee also talks about intuitive process. —Yes, Klee talked about the intuitive using the simile of a tree. He describes the experience of the artist as that of a channel, much the way the trunk of a tree transmutes the nutrients from the roots to the crown of the tree. His last remarks on this really speak to it all, where Klee defines the artist as a channel from which all that is deep inside is gathered and passed through, ultimately flourishing outward to define the glory of the tree. He writes, “And the beauty at the crown is not his own.” I am struck by the poetry involved in the intuitive process that Klee describes.5

Later in graduate school, you were faced with choices and directions. Talk about the two-forked 20th Century trajectory that many graduate students in art confront and tell me about the path that you chose. —In the early 20th Century there were two strong artistic visionaries at work to redirect the visual arts: Kandinsky and Duchamp. They were contemporaries, but their approaches toward art making couldn’t be more dissimilar. Duchamp’s critiques of artistic conventions used humor and irony, while Kandinsky’s critique was more sincere, with a clear aim to redirect the two-dimensional image toward abstraction. One could say he had altruistic aims

40

in pushing away from materialism. Kandinsky used the word spiritual, a word that is infrequently batted about in the art world today, perhaps a taboo.

Taboo? Or passé or irrelevant? —Maybe considered passé, or perhaps after a century, perspectives have shifted. Roger Lipsey in An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art,6 wrote a crucial study of the characteristics of Kandinsky’s concept of the spiritual in art. The book was helpful to me as a thorough history of the spiritual in 20th Century art. But today, few speak of the spiritual in art. It is the scientists and physicists in particular who wonder about the universe and why it is the way it is and attempt to conceptualize it. When they express themselves, it sounds like the language of mystics. As evidence is gathered and contributes to a deeper understanding of reality and the cosmos, then perhaps the visual arts will respond to this new paradigm.

Kandinsky talked about the “nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game.” He spoke of “inner necessity,” which means to be guided from within.

He called it “honesty of the most demanding kind, obliging the artist to search, to wait, to pay close attention.” —When Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1912, he thought materialism needed to be challenged, and the artist had a key role in restoring spirituality in culture. Alas, materialism is still a driving force today.

What was it about “inner necessity” and creating your work? —When “inner necessity” is the guiding principle, then artwork has a reason to be created.

Authenticity and honesty must necessarily follow. To me “inner necessity” is contemplative watchfulness. The process of seriously paying attention translates as an inner guide. Every day I watch for what comes up and the things that call to me or strike me. It is my intention to under-stand the significance of each thing and reflect on transcribing it into my creative work.

Tell me about this contemplative watchfulness. —It’s more like internalized listening.

Kandinsky also uses the words ”inner sound,“ where you are trying to listen to the inner sound of everything. He believed that our ears pick up a vibration, not what something looks like, but it picks up something higher. So one could say that as artists we’re trying to get our eyes to function at the higher level that our ears do, which is seeing the higher vibration in the subject of your art.

Color is a powerful element in Kandinsky’s work, yet you tend to use an achromatic palette. —Much of my work has been in color. It’s only in the last 20 years that the work shifted to black and white. Kandinsky has an acute sensitivity to color. Because of his interest in color, it was the element he used to express himself.

By contrast, line and texture are the elements that give me the transcendent results I am looking for. Kandinsky’s vision for an art that could uplift had pure abstraction and color as a strategy. Here I deviate from him. Kandinsky’s pure abstraction, with no reference to representation, is too dispassionate for me. Intuitive feeling and a personal connection to nature are my touchstones.

41

42

Incarnate Torrent (Lewis Creek, Sierra Foothills) from Earthbody, 2006

Working the physical state into a transcendental state, you seem to be documenting the body as present, yet not. It seems to me that Incarnate Torrent (opposite) created at Lewis Creek in the Sierra foothills, is one result of this. —In fact, there is a series of drawings called Earth Body that includes Incarnate Torrent. Earth Body is a watershed series for me. Here the human figure and nature, as landscape, come together in a unique way. Each, though distinct, are made from essentially the same material, an intrinsic oneness. Once I completed the drawings (sketchbook size) from Lewis Creek, back in the studio they were cut up and collaged on to another sheet of paper; the landscape now appears fragmented. A complete figure was then drawn on top of the collaged landscape. The figure becomes the unifying force integrating all disparate parts.

In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous,7 author David Abram wrote a passage in his preface as follows: “The color of sky, the rush of waves—every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.

Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.” Given Abram’s quote, what type of conversation does your art, particularly your work at Lewis Creek, have with what Abram is writing about?

—When Abram describes nature, I feel like he’s describing the world that I am drawing. For me the earth is sacramental; I work directly from nature. I sit in front of a mountain, a stream, a tree, and I look, feel and read the land, which is both a sign and a place, and I draw.

One of the things I remember most from your teaching is your philosophy with respect to the erasure of line. You explained that with pentimenti the past presence of the line was the most appealing part of the work. It seems a bit phenomenological, the shift of the drawer’s eyes, the shift of the model, all movements during moments in time, all lending itself to different perspectives, many in ghostly states.

—Erasures and erasers, the taking away of something, the Italian pentimenti translates ”repentances,” the absence, or removing, of something that once was there.

The ghostly states in the drawing, that is, where it had been and where it was, all made the drawing a more complete experience in conveying life.

We’ve talked about Kandinsky. Yet another artist whose work you admire is Max Ernst, a surrealist. You connect with him because of his artistic techniques. Something about the techniques you used to create Water Body (page 45) reminds me of the diverse processes from which his work took shape; frottage, for example.

—The surrealists invented games and playful processes to assist writers and artists in the art of quieting the rational mind. I frequently avail myself of their processes and their attitude of playful openness. Collage, frottage, decalcomania, and the use

43

of chance are regular surrealist strategies in my “art box.” So in the Water Body series I wanted to use water’s properties. I wasn’t sure how to do this. After messing around awhile, I stumbled on an approach that I thought would work. I soaked my paper in a mountain stream and then applied ink to the paper and noticed some interesting marks. I began using what I learned from that experience in the Water Body series.

Tell me more about the process. —In Water Body, I would soak a large piece of watercolor paper in the mountain stream, then I would take the paper out of the water and throw ink on it. Then I would distribute on top of the paper things that I would find in the forest: dried leaves, needles, pinecones and bark. Then I would bundle up the paper, put it in my car and drive back to my studio. In the 45 minutes that it would take me to get down the mountain, the ink and the debris from the forest would have “done their dance” on the surface of the paper: Water did its part and chance played itself out. It’s because of the surrealists and their interests in playful approaches to creativity that this door was opened to me.

I’m intrigued with your translation of the Dao to your work, particularly, how you have taken its ideological facets and applied them in your process. Please elaborate.

—As I began this series about water, I was reading an article in Art in America about Pat Steir and her Waterfall paintings. It mentioned her interest in the Dao De Jing.

Steir uses the qualities of paint as both the material and the signifier. She throws paint and drips paint in the way Dao painters used ink. I did quite a bit of experimentation until eventually I discovered the approach to water I wanted to use. This was where water, by its very nature, was changing the tactile quality of the paper, and all kinds of unexpected things began happening.

The Dao is an ancient Chinese system of finding man’s path of cooperation with the natural world. The Dao is often referred to as the watercourse way, meaning that its

44

Water House V from Water Body, 2009

philosophy is like water or the attributes of water. One characteristic of water is that it always chooses the easiest path. It never tries to go uphill or flow the hard way. Under the Dao, painting was considered one of the highest expressions of spirituality. So, in Water Body, I was interested in investigating water not as a subject but for its attributes.

Clearly paper is a big part of your work. How does paper serve your creative needs outside of being part of your material process?

—In Water Body the paper needed to be heavyweight watercolor paper to handle the current in mountain streams. Paper is an integral part of my process and ideas: It is common, natural, and ubiquitous. I intend my choice of paper to be a presence, its surface and its edges. Paper is vulnerable to smudges, tears, burns or cuts. Its impermanence attracts me. I have access to paper that is thin, handmade and translucent, as well as 300-pound heavy-gauge watercolor paper. The world of paper is vast: Paper can be delicate and fragile or strong and durable.

There is an interplay of presence and absence in your work. This interplay is fascinating in your early pieces where you work with color, presenting the transitory state of natural things, such as a leaf or a flower. The strong presence of a richly applied red created in your pastel piece Sensitive Chaos, and in your series, Abstraction of Flowers, are good examples. When we were talking about them, there was a sadness to your commentary because they [the flowers] were no longer there. In a sense, you are continually experiencing the absence, the ephemeral, an absence after the presence. —When I choose flowers as the subject of attraction, what I feel toward them is first their beauty. The second feeling is for their fleeting beauty. In other words, they are exquisite, but for a very short time.

How did the idea of The Listener (page 46) series come about?

—I was reading the morning newspaper and the words ”the listener” jumped out at me. And just stuck in my head. So as I went about my day, I kept reflecting, “Did I read that? What is that?” There was so strong of a push inside that I looked at it again. This time, I reached for my sketchbook and wrote it down. And within a week, I hired a male model. I shared with him what the words ”the listener,“ had grown to mean to me. It meant the person who is keenly aware of sounds, of what’s around him or her, so the experience is an internal experience.

Even though your ears are what’s hearing these sounds, the poses needed to be of an internal nature so they would depict something

45

Winter Night Waters from Water Body, 2009

46

The Listener III, 2009

that’s suggestive of the internal rather than the external. With that instruction, the model would take different poses. When the model would find a pose that I liked, I would do the piece. That day, I created seven drawings within a few hours. I was pulling everything out because everything I touched was working, and the model kept changing poses, and I would move around the studio looking at these poses from different angles. All this came from reading the morning paper!

Scott Barry Kaufman cites psychological research that indicates ”there’s something about living life with passion and intensity, including the full depth of human experience that is conducive to creativity.“ What do you do to increase your state of creativity? What is your wellspring for ideas or thematic concepts? What about your selection of materials? —To increase my state of creativity, I break habits and routines, embrace the new and alien, have adventures and get scared. Ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. I try to stay mindful of what’s going on around me.

Usually if I encounter something important, it will send an electric charge through my body. I make it my artistic duty to write it down, so I don’t forget. My sketchbook is my usual repository for anything and everything that grabs my attention, and then it, in turn, becomes my source book.

The materials of art making have a spiritual connection to my ideas. I sketch regularly, playfully combining materials, keeping my attunement with the material’s characteristics and experimenting with new materials—new in the sense that I have not used them before, or new in the sense that they are a new product. This regular practice keeps me in touch with my materials, surfaces, and their intrinsic natures.

The Four Arms of Kali (page 26 and 27) is a monumental work of four panels, each with two figures, and each representing one of the four arms of Kali. This work must have involved a rather intensive process. —Because of its size and surface, The Four Arms of Kali required quite a bit of planning and testing—experimentation and playfulness in all of its parts as I decided upon materials and approaches. Formal considerations come first. I decided to reincarnate the waxed papers from A Step in the Dark. I hoped their transparent quality would give “Kali” a transcendent feel and the falling ghostlike figures would add another layer.

In the Hindu world, Kali is God manifest as nature. I love the way she is depicted with four arms standing on Shiva, who is God of the Infinite—the cosmic mother.

Each of her four arms represents some aspect of divine presence on earth. Two arms are creative and sustaining, and two arms are destructive. I relate to this image of a strong female with many arms!

The Four Arms of Kali is an allegory and is structured as a quadriptych, each panel depicting one of the four arms, two panels designed to convey the powerful, destructive part of nature, and the other two panels communicate life, birth, and sustaining growth—the nurturing aspects of the natural world. In this four-fold way

47

Kali leads creation back to Spirit. The figures include a visionary, wanderer, trickster, poet, initiate, prophet, man and woman. Each is immersed in the landscape and participates in the life surrounding them. Each panel is a complete composition, yet the four parts are to be read as one piece.

Maureen Bloomfield, who wrote an essay on your work, The Luminosity of Line, opened with a quote taken from Pierre Schneider’s Matisse,8 “In a profane world, drawing is the ultimate source of the numinous.” Please comment. —It is a beautiful quote. Numinous is defined as having a strong religious or spiritual quality indicating or suggesting the presence of divinity. For me it goes back to line. In Drawing,9 Philip Rawson ties together drawing and the spiritual. The fact that drawing is associated with line, brings it full circle. He says that “in a sense one can say that drawing is the most fundamentally spiritual, that is, completely subjective of all visual artistic activities.” Line does not have a reference in the world. Color is in the world and is referential; and painters use color. Sculptors use space, dimension, weight and mass—all facets of this world. But line isn’t readily evident in the world, so it’s the most abstract of the elements. Lines are invented, fabrications of an artist’s imagination; they are to be played with and responsively shaped by an inner vision.

They serve no external reality. So the quote about the numinous takes me to drawing, and then to line, and then to Rawson and his way of interpreting drawing—I experience the autonomy and potential of line in my work.

Endnotes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

48

Robert L. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art: (Ten Unabridged Essays, Spectrum/Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 87.

John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook, (New York: Random House, 2011) Rico Lebrun, Rico Lebrun Drawings, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 25.

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (London: Constable and Company Limited, London, 1912).

Herbert, p.76 Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1988) David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, (New York: Random House, 1996) Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), p. 384 Philip Rawson, Drawing, 2nd edition, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987)

49

Earthbody from Body Water, 2007 - 2009

50

Pile VII, 2003

51

Catalogue of the Exhibition Body/Land: 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid All works in the exhibition are loaned courtesy of the artist, unless otherwise indicated.

Women Make by Water, 1989 Pastel on paper, 86” X 32” p. 11

“2 Figure Drawings” details from Energy is the Body, 1998 Charcoal on paper, 72” x 35” each Video: Dance performances for “Energy is the Body”

A Discontent and Reaching, 1993 Pastel on paper, 91” x 39.5” p. 57 Seeking an End to Ignorance, 1993 Pastel on paper, Diptych 96” x 65” Collection of Margaret Hudson A Step in the Dark, 1994 Charcoal on waxed papers and powder white tempera on gallery walls, 45’L x 22’W x 12’H p. 37

Migratory Red, 1998 Pastel on paper, 26.5” x 37” Devotional Figures, 1998 Pastel on paper, 60” x 40” Trinity of the Self II, 2000 Charcoal on paper, 60 x 42” p. 19 Trinity of the Self IV, 2000 Charcoal on paper, 60 x 42”

Video of “Energy is the Body” ”Untitled” from the series Threshold of the Visible, 1997 Mixed media collage on handmade paper, 47 x 30” p. 14 “Untitled” from the series Threshold of the Visible, 1997 Mixed media collage on handmade paper, 47 x 30” Sensitive Chaos, 1997 Pastel on paper, 32” x 19” Collection of the Tony Cantu Family Wind of My Brother, 1997 Pastel on paper, 27 x 37” p. 17 Energy is the Body, 1998 Charcoal on gallery walls & charcoal on paper 70’L x 21’W x 12’H p. 16

52

Study for “Women Make by Water” Shades of Gray: Four Approaches to Drawing, 2001 Charcoal on paper, 20” x 60” “Study” for The Mound Project, 2002 Charcoal on paper, 24” x 40” Pile III, 2003 Charcoal of paper, 32” x 18.5” Pile VII, 2003 Charcoal on paper, 30” x 44” p. 50 Transfigure I, 2004 Charcoal on paper, 60 x 40” p. 33 Transfigure III, 2004 Charcoal on paper, 60” x 42”

Transfigure IV, 2004 Charcoal on paper, 60 x 40” p. 32 The Fallen I, 2004 Charcoal on paper, 19.5” x 22.5” The Fallen IV, 2004 Charcoal on paper, 19.5” x 22.5” p. 7 The Ancient, 2005 Pastel and charcoal on paper, 80” x 100” p. 21 The Watercourse Way (Bridal Veil Falls), 2006 Charcoal and pastel on collaged paper, 40” x 30” p. 34 Incarnate Torrent (Lewis Creek, Sierra Foothills), 2006 Charcoal and pastel on collaged paper, 39” x 30” p. 42 Embodied Maelstrom (San Joaquin River), 2006 Charcoal and pastel on collaged paper, 28” x 39” Collection of Steve and Denise Yribarren p. 23 “Water is your Body” (from a Navajo saying), 2007 Graphite, lithographic crayon, and ink on paper, 120” x 24” Video: “Marking Movements” from the Fresno Rogue Festival, 2007 Dance/Drawing performance with Beth Megill Perpetual Becoming and Falling, 2007 Graphite, lithographic crayon, ink on paper, 120” x 24”

53

“The Earth is Endlessly Deep”, 2007 The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain Graphite, lithographic crayon, and ink on paper, 120” x 24” p. 4 “Earthbody” from the series Body Water, 2007 - 2009 Charcoal and ink on collaged paper, 48” x 32 p. 49 Winter Night Waters, 2009 Sumi Ink on arches watercolor paper, 96” x 30” p. 45 Circulatory Movements of Life, 2009 Sumi ink on arches watercolor paper, 96” x 30” p. 31 Water House V, 2009 Sumi Ink on arches watercolor paper, 38” x 42” p. 44 The Listener III, 2009 Sumi ink & gesso on wood panel, 48” x 42” Collection of Selena Mitchell p. 46 “The Safety of Constraint” from the The Warnors Window Project, 2009 Fulton Windows: each 96” x 41”, 6 panels: 96” x 246” p. 24 The Four Arms of Kali, 2012 Quadriptych: graphite, ink, wax & acrylic on paper 96” x 174” p. 26

anne Scheid Biography website: annescheid.com

Education 1989 Master of Fine Arts, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 1975 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Edgecliff College, Cincinnati, Ohio

Solo Exhibitions 2016 Body/Land: A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid, Arte AmĂŠricas, Fresno Art Museum, and Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College, Fresno, California 2010 Body Water (performance by Tayu), Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2009 The Window Project: The Safety of Constraint, Warnors Theater, Fresno, California 2007 Earthbody, Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2005 Witness, Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California 2000 Vessel Drawings, Fresno City College Library Gallery, Fresno, California 1998 Energy is the Body (installation and performance), Gallery 25, Fresno, California 1997 New Drawings, Plums Contemporary Arts, Fresno, California 1997 Threshold of the Visible, Gallery 25, Fresno, California 1994 A Step in the Dark (installation), Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California 1992 Recent Drawings, ArtSpace Gallery, Fresno City College, Fresno, California 1989 Distilled (installation), 840 Gallery, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 1987 Malton Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio 1982 Malton Art Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio 1981 Studio Gallery, Dubuque, Iowa 1981 Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa

Selected Group Exhibitions 2015 Beautiful Planet: In Celebration of Nature, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, California One Degree of Separation: A Sisterhood of California Women Artists, Arte AmĂŠricas, Fresno, California 2014 California Vision, Selma Arts Center Annex Gallery, Selma, California Summer Solstice: The Longest Light, 1821 Gallery & Studios, Fresno, California

54

2013 Water, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, California 2012 Edges: From The California Contemporary Art Collective, Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California Dancing the Storm, Jewel FM Art Gallery, Fresno, California 2010 Safety of Constraint, Phebe Conley Art Gallery, Department of Art and Design, California State University, Fresno Voices Miami, Aldo Castillo Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Gallery 10, Washington, D.C. Millennium Corniche Hotel, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 2008 Alchemy, Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2006 Landscape of the Sublime, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, California Draw a Line and Follow It, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, California Sacred Realm: The Spiritual in Art, Santa Ana College Main Gallery, Santa Ana, California 2005 The Tree of Life, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, California Drawing Matters, Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2004 30th Anniversary Exhibition, Gallery 25, Fresno, California Lamentations, Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2003 Woman as Symbol (juried exhibition), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California The Mound Project (installation, with Stephanie Ryan), Gallery 25, Fresno, California 2002 Floribunda: A Botanical Odyssey, Santa Ana College Main Gallery, Santa Ana, California The Chai Show, Platt & Borstein Galleries, American Jewish University, Bel Air, California Archetypal Allusions (juried exhibition), Platt & Borstein Galleries, American Jewish University, Bel Air, California The Next Wave II: Fresno Artists of the New Era, Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California 2001 Shades of Grey: Four Approaches to Drawing, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, California 2000 Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, California Association of Artists Gallery, Moscow, Russia (also to Sterlitamak, Ufa, and Ekaterinburg) Trinity of the Self, Gallery 25, Fresno, California

1999 Origins: The Body as Source, Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California Origins: The Body as Source, Merced College Art Gallery, Merced, California 1998 Energy is the Body (installation and dance performance), Gallery 25, Fresno, California 1995 Dorothy Weis Gallery, San Francisco, California 1992 Fig Tree Gallery, Fresno, California 1991 Tangeman Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 1990 Mount St. Joseph University, Cincinnati, Ohio 1989 Graduate Show, Tangeman Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio

Special Projects 2007 Marking Movements, a dance drawing performance with Beth Megill for the Rogue Festival, Fresno, California 2001 Monster Feminine, designed theater sets for a dance choreographed by Rogelio Lopez for the City Dances 25th Anniversary Performance at Fresno City College, Fresno, California 1997 Bambi, designed theater sets for an opera composed by Kam Morill and premiered at the Kadel Theater, Seattle, Washington

Reviews/articles Gina Strumwasser, Ph.D., “The Safety of Constraint” in The Window Project at the Warnors Theater, self-published in Fresno, 2010.

Donald Munro, “Scheid Impresses With Her Body of Work,” The Fresno Bee, September 14, 2007.

Maureen Bloomfield, “Unfinished Because Unfolding”, The Artist’s Magazine, May 2007, pp. 38-43.

Trude McDermott, “Next Wave II: Fresno Artists of the New Era,” The Muse Letter, Summer 2002.

Suvan Geer, “Shades of Gray at El Camino College,” ArtWeek, November 2001.

Megumi Santo, “Drawing Show by Southern California Artists: Shades of Gray,” Yomiuri America, September 21, 2001.

Polly Victor, “Commentary: Gallery 25 Exhibition Review,” LINEonline.net: Fresno’s Fine & Folk Arts Journal, September 2000.

Charles Gaines, “Art and the Search for Origins Amidst the Scent of Flowers” in Origins: The Body as Source (exhibition catalog), Fresno Art Museum, 1999.

55

Maren Henderson, Ph.D., “Origins: Drawings of the Body,” in Origins: The Body as Source (exhibition catalog), Fresno Art Museum, 1999.

David Hale, “On A Grand Scale,” The Fresno Bee, August 30, 1998.

Gina Strumwasser, Ph.D., Energy Is The Body (exhibition brochure), Gallery 25, Fresno, California, 1998.

Maureen Bloomfield, “Anne Scheid: The Luminosity of Line,” in A Step in the Dark (exhibition brochure), Fresno Art Museum, 1994.

Jerry Stein, “New Design Experience Impressive,” The Cincinnati Post, November 3, 1990.

Maureen Bloomfield, review in Dialogue, Fall 1987.

Jonathon Z. Kamholtz, “Anne Scheid: Tumultuous Pastorals,” Dialogue, November/December 1982.

“Quarry Drawings Express Artist’s Deep Feelings,” Telegraph Herald (Dubuque, Iowa), March 13, 1980, p. 25.

Owen Findsen, “There Are Still a Few Good Painters Around,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, May 20, 1979.

awards, Recognition, Grants 2005 Bonner Foundation/State Center Community College District Foundation grant for the Fresno, California citywide Drawing Matters exhibition 1989 Distinguished Graduate Student, University of Cincinnati 1988 Wolfstein Travel Fellowship to Japan, University of Cincinnati

Collections Armco Insurance Armco Steel, Inc. AT&T Baker, Knapp & Tubbs Bellefonte Re-Insurance Blue Cross/Blue Shield C.E.S. Associates Cincinnati Bell, Inc. IBM The Kroger Co. Medical Associates, Inc. The Neilsen Company O’Connor, Thomas, Hammer, Bertsch & Norby Phototype Engraving Co. Proctor & Gamble Senco Corp.

Western Paper Products

Support for this exhibition has been provided by

This catalogue is published by the Anne Scheid Project in conjunction with the exhibition Body/Land: A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid

Joyce Aiken

Exhibition Venues:

Angie Bray and Steve DeWitt Polly Brewer Jackie and Ray Doumanian

Arte AmĂŠricas 1630 Van Ness Avenue, Fresno CA 93721 www.arteamericas.org

Charles and Lenore Figg Charles and Renae M. Floyd Friends of the Arts at Fresno City College Bob and Ellen Hirth

Fresno Art Museum 2233 N. First Street, Fresno CA 93703 www.fresnoartmuseum.org

Cheryl and Terry Kershaw Paul and Norma Logan Laura Meyer Selena Mitchell

Art Space Gallery, Fresno City College 1101 E. University Avenue, Fresno CA 93741 www.fresnocitycollege.edu

Carol and Tim Neichter Anita Ruffner Margaret Scheid and Patricia Bernier Mark and Jessica Scheid (Fidelity Charitable Grant) Paul Scheid (United Technologies) and Roslyn Scheid (Voya) Robert and Jean Scheid Valerie Shesko and Edgar Slotkin Carolyn Sterling Dr. Sue Stone Julia Tsao

Catalogue Design: Kristi Carlson Photography: Michael Karibian, Randy Vaughn-Dotta, Tomas Ovalle Body/Land: A 25-Year Retrospective of Anne Scheid Curator and Essayist: Gordon L. Fuglie Interviewer: by Hazel Antaramian Hofman Foreword: Michele Ellis Pracy Includes Catalogue of the Exhibition, Biography, Color plates

Kathy Wosika and David Fox ISBN 978-0-932325-57-0 0-932325-57-2

Additional support has been provided by Fresno Free College Foundation Nina Roby Byron Russell Patrick Marmolejo Tim Padilla Mieko Suzuki

56

Central California Artist - 20th Century Artist 20th Century Contemporary Contemporary Drawing Female artist Exhibition Catalogue Copyright 2015 The Anne Scheid Project. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publishers. The copyright of works of art reproduced in this book are retained by the artist, her heirs, successors, and assignees. All texts are copyright of their respective authors.

57

A Discontent and a Reaching, 1993

…Scheid’s eloquent, gestural line does not contain, as Henri Matisse’s did, the form. Instead, it indicates the form’s dissolution and, at times, its metamorphosis. Scheid’s line moves; it describes movement.

As such, it resists closure. Because her drawing is charged with both anxiety and exhilaration, it diverts attention away from itself and toward the artist. It is what the Renaissance artist and critic Federico Zuccari called disegno interno, inner drawing. It chronicles an internal event; it is in process. Invoking the forma spiritual, it moves toward light, toward the epiphany of light.”

Maureen Bloomfield, Anne Scheid: The Luminosity of Line, from Anne Scheid: A Step in the Dark.

58