In celebration
of Bill Schenck's first solo exhibition at Vanier Gallery and his inclusion in
the Desert Caballeros Western Museum's exhibition of the thirty most influential
Western artists of the twentieth century, an honor not lightly bestowed, it is
important to consider carefully this artist whose works have been somewhat of
a conundrum. Often infused with a Warholian sense of irony, satire, and humor,
Schenck's lively paintings just as easily reveal a sense of grandeur and nostalgia
for the West, reminiscent of Albert Bierdstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926).
With a truly American painting style and singular Western subject matter, Schenck
serves up a potpourri of themes and scenes that have at once delighted and unnerved
viewers since the 1960s.
Schenck is a contemporary American painter who
incorporates techniques from Photo-Realism with a Pop Art sensibility to both
exalt and poke fun at images of the West. Urban cowboys leaning against their
Cadillac's; cheesecake poses of nude, rodeo queens and film stars; stills from
Western films, Western landscapes and romanticized scenes from the Native American
past are images and themes that have all been included in Schenck's artistic repertoire.
Created in a hard-edge style where colors are laid side by side rather than blended
or shadowed, Schenck's paintings reveal the many faces of the West, from the sublime
aspects of nature and simple lifestyle to modern-day self conscious excesses and
glorified cliches.
Born in the Midwest in 1947, a quintessential baby-boomer,
Bill Schenck attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio
from 1965-1967. He then transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri,
where he received a Bachelor of fine Arts degree in 1969. At this time, his paintings
revealed an expressive figurative style, emulating the modern British painter
Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Shortly after graduation, Schenck began a series of
paintings reinventing classical Renaissance ceiling paintings in a minimalist
style, paying homage to such masters as Michelangelo, Raphael and Tiepolo. Leaving
the conformity of his middle America upbringing and following the dream of many
young American artists, Schenck headed for New York, armed with his new work and
soon found himself in the midst of the New York art scene, dominated at the time
by such artists as Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997).1
Pop Art's reliance on silk screening, photography, mass production, Madison
Avenue advertising and Hollywood glitz were well suited to Schenck's growing artistic
interests and still influence his work today. Adopting the cultural critique as
his Pop Art mentors, Schenck explored a favorite theme since childhood, icons
and narratives of the Wild West. What separated Schenck from others before him
who tackled this subject matter was his orientation, not from a Western art tradition,
but from an already altered and manufactured view of the West through the eyes
of the filmmaker. "Schenck took on both the myths of Hollywood and Madison
Avenue, capitalizing on those that grew out of and fired Manifest Destiny,"
reports a Wyoming State retrospective of his works almost a decade ago.2
Schenck continued his fascination with the myth of the West for thirty years,
continually stretching the boundaries of style and content.
Greatly influenced
by the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, of "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly"
fame, whose camera angles he had emulated in his earlier ceiling paintings, Schenck
began to appropriate poignant moments of high action from Spaghetti-Western movie
stills. These "cowboy" paintings, while literal in the recreation of
a certain moment in a film, make interesting visual puns on the notion of Photo-Realism.
Since the scene is pure fantasy conjured up by filmmakers, Schenck poses the question,
"which part is the photo-reality; the mechanical act of appropriating the
image from another medium or the subjectivity of the narrative"3.
Already developing a manipulation of space by the use of restrained color and
strong contrast, Schenck captured the essence of the Western adventure narrative
alive with movement and atmosphere. Cool and detached, his Western heroes (Gregory
Peck, Henry Fonda, and Gary Cooper among them) exuded sexuality while his scenes
played on the nostalgia of Saturday-afternoon childhoods long past, all the while
appealing to a sense of newness by the manner of his Pop-styled hard-edge minimalism.
While working on this series, it became apparent to Schenck that many of
the compositions provided in the movie stills did not accurately portray his vision,
so he began to alter the image by making composites from more than one photograph
to balance the picture plane and enhance the scene. Unlike Photo-Realists working
since the mid-1960s, Schenck, while using the technology of the camera and projector,
edited and fabricated his posed characters within environments that were both
real and imagined. As others of this movement photographed the pure reality of
a scene, controlling only the camera angle and lens to add drama to their compositions,
Schenck carefully manipulated his images, making sketches and drawings to prepare
for the final canvas. Taking this concept a step further, Schenck began to use
stencils, airbrushes, and spray guns in his work, emulating his Photo-Realist
colleague, John Clem Clarke (b. 1937). By 1973 Schenck was photographing his own
landscapes, incorporating his carefully planned compositions. 4
A downturn in the art market in New York in the mid-1970s and a growing fascination
with the simple lifestyle emulated in his paintings encouraged Schenck to move
to the West, splitting his time between Arizona and Wyoming. Now the artist had
real life situations from which to draw upon for his compositions and he made
increasing use of his own photography, eventually diminishing the use of the fantasy-based
movie stills in favor of a new fascination--the Western rodeo. Along with the
increasing use of realism came a heightened sense of color and many of the works
from this period show a much bolder use of color--bright reds, brilliant blues,
and flashing pinks began to emerge--all the while interwoven with paintings created
with the bleached out, desert-baked color schemes of earlier works. Immersing
himself into that culture, Schenck even participated in rodeo circuit riding,
and by the late 1970s, many of his Silent Violence" paintings depicted rodeo
life. Still, as in the years to come, Schenck did not abandon any prior techniques
or compositional elements, but kept them as part of a growing repertoire of places,
motifs and characters.
One scene in particular that Schenck has developed
over the years began with a movie still of Gregory Peck standing over a fallen,
arrow-pierced cowboy. Many paintings emerged with this composition of cowboy hero
and male victim. By the late 1970s, Schenck's sense of satire had emerged full
force. By them, as part of Schenck's formulaic editing, the unknown victim was
no longer the expected protagonist from an Indian battle, but a provocative femme
fatale.5 Often jarring in their incongruent nudity, such compositions
remind the viewer that Schenck is not simply reveling in Western fantasy, but
using the genre to launch into uncharted territory about gender and machismo,
the male-dominated world of movies, and expectations versus magic realism served
up contemporary Pop Western-style.
It was natural then for Schenck, as
an evolution of his investigation into Wild West mythology and fantasy, to look
at another side of Western life--the growing popularity of the "urban cowboy"
culture as a fashion and lifestyle statement of which the artist was part. Confidently
posed in from of a sleek white Cadillac with the palm tree backdrop of a Scottsdale
resort, Schenck the modern cowboy leans against the cowboy's growing transportation
of choice. Herein lies the paradox. While up to this time Schenck had been the
romanticizing observer or the detached critic of American myths about class, money,
and desire, he now inserted himself into the scene, admitting he had bought into
the New West American dream and reveling in its exciting excesses.6
Continuing on this path, he began a deconstruction of the image of the woman
of the West as helpless pioneer, so convincingly portrayed by John Vanderlyn (1775-1852)
and Irving Couse (1866-1936).7 A precursor to the spirit of female
solidarity exemplified in the 1990 movie "Thelma and Louise," Schenck,
as early as 1974, replaced these victim images with bold, almost brazen, nude
rodeo queens and cowgirls, bedecked with flashy cowboy hats and sporting the ubiquitous
sunglasses (an apparent motif in both contemporary cowboy art and Native American
art of this time). Masters of their own fate, these women are proud of their bodies,
of their strength and the power they hold over men and women alike. In a new twist,
current paintings in this genre, as in A Cacophony of Silence, 1999, portray the
nude rodeo queen in silhouette, in silent contemplation, watching a string of
cowboys ride into a sublime Western sunset. The viewer still can make out the
hat, the sunglasses and the bandanna blowing in the wind, but now she is in the
shadows, acting as the voyeur to the voyeur.
Schenck's work continued
to chronicle the times and while his paintings had always delved into the world
of fantasy, the lines became even more blurred. For example, in the late 1970s
a series of paintings emerged reconstituting a popular brand of cereal. Instead
of a wholesome athlete depicted on the box cover, Schenck portrayed a detached
nude rodeo queen, lounging in Manet's 'Olympia' fashion, and a self portrait of
the artist in a punk-styled, drug-frenzied mania, special offers promoting "27
Worth of Coke on Package Back!" or "Free Inside Desperate Living Coupon."
Clearly Schenck was examining another facet of Western life, one that had many
social implications which changed the perception of the West as a symbol of purity,
and reminded viewers of the Wild West's more notorious history and its continued
sense of liberation and brashness. Scottsdale, Jackson Hole and Santa Fe would
never be the same, and Schenck was there to record its transition from the sublime
to the ridiculous.
An offshoot of this series developed with further
elaborated on social commentary. Called the "graffiti" paintings by
the artist, these paintings were pastiches of supermarket tabloid covers, Saturday
Evening Post images and headlines, and rambling doodles from Schenck's fervent
juggling of investments, collections and art career. Mixing romantic images of
the Old West with the superimposed graffiti of mortgage figures on a new land
deal, as in Up in Smoke 1981, pinpoints the absurdity of the past mingled with
the realities of the present. This relatively short series of works somehow melded
all of Schenck's techniques and themes into one cacophony of visual information.
In the catalog for Schenck's 1983 retrospective at the Scottsdale Center for the
Arts, writer Lynn Rigberg commented, "The resulting paintings are an unsettling
blend of ingratiating, assaultive (sic), nostalgic, commercial, private, witty,
seductive, comic and sad elements. The images with relentless vigor, with informational
energy not unlike the contemporary plethora of magazine and television advertisements.
These are studies in Southwest supermarket checkout sociology."8
Schenck's focus on graffiti works was short-lived, but sure to resurface as the
artist chooses to utilize this technique for social commentary and personal reflection.
Referencing his Pop Art roots, at the same time Schenck created a series
of paintings that tipped their hats to Roy Lichtenstein, complete with delineated
color fields of half tone dots. This would not be the last time overt references
to Lichtenstein and the Pop sensibility would appear in his work, as comic-book
style commentary marked the tone for later series spoofing the drama of Western
pulp fiction and cinema. Often these text bubbles serve to reinforce the absurdity
of the scene. For example, in Oh Geez, 1999, a re-emerging Gregory Peck stands
in a stark, bleached out desert staring incredulously over a seductive, sleeping
nude, and "Oh Geez" bubble leading the viewer to the pun. Her pose suggests
she is hardly a victim, but the mystery of her existence in the desert, let alone
the incongruity of the presence of the duded-up Western hero looking over her,
indulges the artist's sense of Mad Magazine-style humor.9
In recent years, however, Schenck has occasionally omitted the text altogether,
allowing the absurdity of the scene to stand on its own and allowing the viewers
to come up with their own explanations. Expanding on the theme of the nude rodeo
queen, Schenck recently created Innuendo, 1998, a picture of a contemporary Native
American woman--we know she is modern because of her dark sunglasses and seductive
pose--robed only to the waist with a patterned blanket, sarong style and holding
a gun over her head. Further tweaking our sense of fantasy, shadows are cast on
a faux landscape of not only the gun-toting model, but the shadow of a reclining
cowgirl, an odd commentary on poetic justice combined with Playboy magazine eroticism.10
Schenck's expanded interest in music has prompted new paintings such as The Crying
Game, 1996, where a kneeling nude implores an indifferent cowboy, while a mariachi
violinist happily serenades the couple. Another similar composition, Leap of Faith,
1999, features a spectacular sunset and a tuxedoed musician who calmly performs
to two floating nudes posing in the air reminiscent of water ballet. Taken from
the work of an unknown 1940s photographer and posing a friend as the pianist (a
la Ingmar Bergman's 7th Seal"), Schenck asks, "Are they leaping into
the heavens or plunging into the abyss?" In these works, Schenck entertains
himself and his audience while packing a visual punch, pulling out all the stops
of his over-the-top sky and landscapes.
While figure studies were always
part of Schenck's oeuvre, it was not until the early 1980s that he developed portraits
with a keener sense of personality portrayal. As before, his cowgirls shield themselves
from view with sunglasses and larger than life cowboy hats, but unlike many of
the rodeo queens, these portraits are clothed, revealing even more about the subjects'
strengths, weaknesses, and message to the viewer. Some like Montana Ana, 1980,
portray the fiercely proud Western woman with embroidered rodeo shirt and colorful
bandanna, while others, such as D.O.A., 1983, depict a more irreverent, strong-willed
"punk" cowgirl, complete with white hat and flashing sunglasses, a defiant
cigarette held firmly in her pouty, glossed lips. As much as personality profiles,
these paintings focus on patterning and the interplay between dark and light tonalities
through the use of raking light and strong contrasts in color. Current portraits
reveal an increased sense of inner peace and wise self-confidence, as in Liz,
1999, a portrait of a contemporary Native American woman, and Cody, 1996, a portrait
of a more demure model set against a painting of a landscape with clearly cast
shadows reinforcing the illusionary effect.11
Always with
the director's eye, Schenck poses his models, creates the props and sets up the
underlying story line in his portraits-turned narrative. The figure of Montana
Ana resurfaced a few years later, now as the toast of contemporary West, leaning
against her Rolls Royce, sporting "No. 1 Fox" license plates and taking
a long, satisfying drag on her cigarette, her flamingo and cactus design boots
completing the scene of success and excess. Clearly this era of paintings is autobiographical
as the artist shares his delight in the financial and artistic successes of his
generation, mixed with a sense of trepidation about the future. The glamour of
the West as movie matinee is now replaced by the West as strange reality and shameless
overindulgence, yet Schenck remains mindful that each portrayal is based on fantasy
by continuing to depict a slower time, a more romanticized West, and the reality
of the working cowboy.
Another focus since the mid-1980s, and perhaps
the most prevalent of Schenck's paintings in recent times, is the pure landscape,
devoid of cars, horses, figures, props such as hats, sunglasses, and guns, and
more importantly social commentary. Schenck admits that these paintings are the
most challenging to him in his attempt to paint "the perfect landscape."
To him, this is not about the essence of painting as much as the compositional
factors necessary to create such grandiosity. To the artist, since no such landscape
exists, it is his duty to "build" one, utilizing his method of photographing
and composing multiple images and the use of the stencil to create the desired
effect.
In these paintings his sense of color, knowledge of art history,
and love of the land is most apparent. Long admiring the Taos School painters
of the 1930s and 19th century American landscape painters, Schenck consciously
allows certain influences in both composition and coloration to be revealed in
his work. The most obvious influence on Schenck's sense of color can be seen in
his paintings from the late 1980s where an explosive sense of brilliant color
references the works of Denver artist Gerard Curtis Delano (1890-1972). Discovering
the work of early twentieth-century California Impressionist Granville Redmond
(1871-1935), Schenck took a new course and merges a Tonalist sensibility with
the flat coloration of his Pop style.12 Still utilizing brilliant color
for effect, Redmond's influence provided a richness that is evident in Schenck's
most recent works such as Clouds Bouncing Off Mesas, 1999, and Bent Tree in Ground,
1998. Herbert Dunton (1878-1936) has been another find for the artist, a source
of theatricality, lighting, and the use of deep colors that becomes evident in
the landscapes and composed figurative works in landscaping settings, such as
Pastoral World in Crisis, 1999. Still, in keeping with Schenck's method of pastiche,
no single reference is made in one painting. Rather a conglomeration of styles
and techniques are utilized, making each composition uniquely the artist's. Schenck
has also borrowed compositional elements from Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and Maxfield
Parrish (1870-1966). He also has created foreshortening effects, courtesy of Taos
School painter Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960), and has tapped everything from
20th century black and white photographers, Canadian Tonalist Tom Thomson (1868-1910),
Harold Von Schmidt (1893-1972), N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), and William R. Leigh (1866-1955).
Schenck's landscapes and those depicting serene scenes of Native American
life, both in the pastoral calm of rural existence, and in nostalgic portrayals
of Native Americans of times past, reveal the sentimental side of the artist,
a throwback to his early love of the romantic side of his fascination with the
West.13 In these works, Navajo women tend their sheep, as in An Ancient
Place, 1999, ride horses through spectacular landscapes. Anasazi women dressed
in hand woven robes, as in Dusk, 1999, carry beautiful ollas to draw water from
a pool.
Still, the swings back and forth from nostalgia and serious reflection
to ironic twists and tongue in cheek silliness prevail in Schenck's oeuvre. A
recent work involving the figure in the landscape, An Uneasy Truce Between Life
and Death, 1999, contemplates life and death. Here, a dark robed Native American,
eerily reminiscent of the Grim Reaper, stands vigil over the land. Obviously,
the artist, in his contemplations, is continuing his autobiographical tendency.
His sense of nostalgia and fatalism lasts only so long, however, before his sense
of humor reappears. In Goddess of the Trout, 1999, a stereotypical Indian Maiden,
nude except for a chief's feather headdress and long coral necklace, poses on
a rock while stylistic trout jump out of the water in unison to pay homage to
their goddess. Equal parts ironic and ecstatic and erotic, always sly and smart,
Schenck indulges his every whim when it comes to subject matter and focus. Because
of the consistency over the years of these theme swings, the method seems to work--there
is something for everyone because the artist remains thoroughly involved and entertained
by his own art making.
Bill Schenck moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in
1996, where undoubtedly new influences and inspirations are already beginning
to emerge. What has remained constant throughout his career is his individuality
in dealing with the subject matter of the West and his unabashed borrowing of
styles, techniques and color sense in a truly reverential manner. Color, composition
and commentary remain steadfast in his work in all its forms, and for that, Bill
Schenck will remain an important figure in the art of the American West.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1
Schenck worked in Warhol's Factory for a short time, meeting Warhol and becoming
part of his extended entourage of workers. Warhol came to Schenck's first solo
exhibition in New York. Conversation with the artist, La Cienega, New Mexico,
5 September 1999.
2 Connie Wieneke, Bill Schenck: A Ten Year Retrospective
1980-1990, (Cheyenne: Wyoming State Museum, 1990) p.2
3 Conversation
with the artist, La Cienega, New Mexico, 5 September 1999.
4
John Arthur, Realism/Photo-Realism, (Tulsa: Philbrook Art Center) p. 68. While
most commonly Photo-Realists created their canvasses from actual scenes projected
from slides onto the canvas, some such as Richard Estes, worked from photographs
and created many preliminary sketches.
5 Lynn Rigberg, Bill Schenck
1968-1983, (Scottsdale: Scottsdale Center for the Arts 1983) p. 10
6
Wieneke, p. 3
7 Frank Getlein, The Lure of the Great West
8
Rigberg, p. 20
9 Such ironic "victims" with comic-book
style cowboy heroes have long been a part of Schenck's repertoire. The Cliff and
Sadie Story, 1990, shown at his retrospective at the Wyoming State Museum in 1990,
exemplifies his tendency to create part humorous, part menacing narratives augmented
with text.
10 Schenck, in defense of his nudes of the West, has
mentioned that these works are most often collected by women, who he says relate
to the sensuality and sexuality of the figures and respond to the fantasy as much
as their male counterparts.
11 The effect of cast shadows on faux
landscapes to heighten a sense of illusion is a conscious homage to Oklahoma painter
Tom Palmore, with who he has been associated for many years. Many of Schenck's
paintings have used this form of shadow play.
12 Wieneke, p. 14
13 Perhaps these series reflect Schenck's expertise in and fervent
collecting of pre-historic Native American pottery and his personal connection
with the people living on reservation in the West. Schenck spends a great deal
of time photographing rural areas of Northern Arizona and New Mexico, places from
which many of his landscapes and backdrops for the composite paintings are derived.
Conversation with the artist, La Cienega, New Mexico, 5 September 1999..
