#7: 8/22/2021

Remembering How to See
(on the paintings of David Schell)
by Benjamin Terrell

My wife Claudia and I recently walked around a large pond near the house that has been empty long enough that grass now grows in its center. It was the end of the day, and the sun was going down glowing, filling the field that the pond was becoming. That evening in the center was something special and rarely seen- a herd of elk and calves grazing. The young ones were sleek and chestnut colored, and after adjusting our eyes to follow their awkward movements we noticed something else unusual and unexpected. A coyote pup had wandered out from the brush into the center of the dry bed,  unaware of us on one side and the elk on the other. What was being revealed felt sacred and seemed to be dependent on our ability to patiently see and be shown something we couldn't have controlled. The grand, all-knowing elk, the rascally pup too new to understand, and us- humans that hunt for words, limited and often unsure of our place in all the unnamable beauty. That experience feels like the perfect metaphor for viewing art in person, especially if you can imagine a great painting as the pond.

Boundary (or The Joy of Uncertainty) 
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately  24” in diameter

A pink circle with a black square center. Pink, the color of intimacy, of infancy, rib and crib contained. Also, an inverted artery to and from the unknown.

Some say the universe doesn't exist when we aren't looking and that the things we see may be manifesting as we see them. I have also read that we are an important part of a participatory cosmic loop where each decision we make can influence our future and our past. It may be tempting to think of ourselves as authors of the ever-changing unknown, but it’s more likely that we exist briefly between the instability of a great creative force and the movement of its ongoing dance. Our unique contribution is then the ability to interpret, envision and engage with the unknown. Artist James Turrell says, " the real mystery is how we give reality to things." Turrell uses light, color, and nature to recreate how we organize what we see, calling the process "behind the eye seeing."

Fuller Moon 
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately 16” x 16”

A full moon is complete illumination. A fuller moon is serene saturation of a sherbet green growing. The green of between a season. A satellite accustomed to longing and becoming wants to cover a white cube? This moon longs to be substantial and square, sick of seldom eclipsing the sun.
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The paintings of David Schell can feel like imagining energy initiating, can look like colorful electric outlets and inlets and are often like phosphenes- the colors and shapes seen sometimes when we close our eyes. A phosphene can feel like a visual origin story somewhere between a first impression and tangible information. Schell's work can inform and radiate like the first light leaked into an eyelid, or glow slowly outward like a luminous emerging light. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel describes color as, "an internal sensation... as fine or as poor as the eyes and the brain of the person who sees it." We may not all be seeing the same things the same way, but consensus is how we connect. Schell's command of color can feel like the crowd outside the club we are waiting to enter- a nameless, anticipatory nod at what's in store once we are acclimated from within. 

Echo
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately 20 ½” in diameter

A sienna circle with two warm glowing squares like a sun and its reflection. Two lights of knowledge that leak in and lead out of Plato's cave.
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In a constructed space by James Turrell, light and color can "saturate the room so that the audience's bodily presence will be neglected or reduced.. to create a sense of infinity." Similarly in Schell's work, saturated signals are both intimate and expansive, and when seen together result in an immensity beyond the image's ability to contain it. They are a room's own hued punctuation points, both negative and positive and both suggestive and summarizing. Schell also conjures one of his heroes, Stanley Whitney. Whitney paints color like a choir, all voices heard at once, and his color grid canvases can feel like “going off the air” messages from the color field movement of yesteryear. Whitney and Schell feel current, though, with both acknowledging the end of old conversations in favor of new ways of perceiving. Both paint electrically from a place where color is king and everything else is aura.

Away from the Rest of the World (Day) 
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately 24" x 24"

Like the artist's earlier images of lightning, but truncated. The center of the center of the storm where the ability to act marries the means to do so. Seen on two canvases (Day and Dusk), they are like a force of nature and its antidote.
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The center and the margins of a painting are of interchangeable importance for Schell. Peter Schjeldahl writes that the edges of a De Kooning and of a Dubuffet painting are like thresholds and that, "Like entrances to temples...[there is...] always a keen registration of physical, mental and moral energy." These meeting places manifest in Davis Schell's work, too, contained by irregular edges, rounded corners, and subtle shifts in space. Schell has said (in his last gallery statement) that, "both Arcadia and perfection are worthwhile goals and completely unattainable." As if to say, overly sacred structures and temples are ruins in reverse and a reminder that order, even in epochs, is always unstable and temporary.

Closer (1)
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately 15 ¾” x 17”

A coral colored, upright rectangle almost occupies a larger, hazy pink rectangle (with a lazy lip) and creates an echo of same shape. Like a mirror that refuses to reflect, art lives outside of an algorithm, has a presence present past a reel, post, or story. Rumi dances around an object until the poetry flows out.
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We have been socially distant for so long, but we have also been unhealthily exposed to and left alone with our egoes, which amplifies a sense of separation. In an ego state we are like Schell's subjects, but are we the container or the contained? Can we begin to imagine ourselves outside our original packaging? Standing in front of one of the artist's paintings we may imagine a window with two sides. If we could only picture ourselves from the object’s other side, what unstable cameos we would be! This is the origin of Schell's humor- life is an awkward twister board for our eyes to act out the dance of impulse versus demand. How can we concentrate on just one thing when the mind is like a GPS without a satellite? Schell paints poetry from instability and his work is a bright light out of the cave called Covid and is a centering place for us to meet outside of what we thought of as ourselves.

Slowly Over Time (3)
2021, oil, pumice and cold wax on panel
approximately 19” x 23”
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A pale pink vessel within a white rounded vase reminds us that a painting is also an object, just as we are creations living within a larger creation. Or, if seen as an interior staircase, a reminder that intimacy is not external. Rather, it is found first through a centered, singular ascent.
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When painting a picture there is a point when artist and image become strangers. Until that point they are kin and confidants, but what manifests on the wall and what was seen inside inevitably will separate. Life itself can feel like a friend becoming an acquaintance when offered the exchange of finite for the infinite. In a painting by Schell, texture is the train station where the two part ways. Pumice and paint can be transparent like veils to pass through or thick and luscious like confections to blindfold the eye into an inner journey. For the artist, the tactile is like the timbre and tone when a bell is struck and is also the place where his painting vibrates into existence. It is both bellows and bell tower where optimistic interiority first resonates into the expansive unknown. 
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David Schell's painting reminds me of my first time seeing one of James Turrell’s "Sky Spaces.” Sky Spaces are Turrell's viewing chambers with apertures in the ceiling where controlled light meets an uncontrollable environment like daylight or dusk. What was once flat becomes form and what harmoniously glows grows beyond our ability to name it. Only through connection (intimacy) and creative suggestion (intimation) can we express worldliness without relying on the world. Stability and instability are different places on the same ceramic pot and our connectedness comes from our brief shared mortality. We are vessels that pour past our inherent flaws. Our brokenness, the common crack that makes us both fragile and unique, is the exact place where our life flows from.

You can see more of David Schell's work:
at Augen Gallery
on his website
on Instagram as schell_david

You can read his interviews with artists at The Semi-Finalist.





All photos in this column by Mario Gallucci