Janet Lippincott and Elmer Schooley are shown at neighboring galleries
Last spring, Elmer Schooley (age 91) and Janet Lippincott (age 88) died within a few days of one another. Besides being longtime friends, both were pioneers of modern art in the Southwest. They are being honored with exhibitions opening today at Karan Ruhlen Gallery and Meyer East Gallery in the complex at 225 Canyon Road.
Ruhlen has mounted a survey of Lippincott’s art that covers six decades. “Janet and Elmer became friends during the mid-1950s,” Ruhlen said. “She was always experimenting with materials and did a number of prints in Elmer’s workshop at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas. This exhibition surveys the best examples of the remarkable variety of materials that Janet explored, including India-ink drawings, watercolors, oils, acrylics, mixed media, linocuts, lithographs, etchings, collages, monoprints, chine colle and sculptures.”
Lippincott was widely traveled by the time she came to New Mexico in the late 1940s. As a young girl, she lived in Paris, and as a teenager she trained in private schools and at the Art Students League in New York. During World War II she served in the Women’s Army Corps attached to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff, suffering injuries during London blitzkriegs that haunted her throughout her life. On the GI Bill, she was lured to New Mexico by the transcendental movement and school of Emil Bisttram in Taos, followed by studies at the San Francisco Institute of Art and the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. In the 1950s, she built a home and studio on Canyon Road.
Identified in the contemporary press as a modern “iconoclast, pioneer and trailblazer,” Lippincott moved from early representational works and a lifelong love of minimalist drawings of the human figure to abstract expressionist paintings built on structural form and saturated colors, for which she gained the most fame.
“Janet was an artist to the core,” says Ruhlen. “Making art was like breathing — it was her way of talking and expressing emotions. She was always looking for fresh ways to communicate her viewpoints, whether in two- or three-dimensional media, including collage and a foray into sculpting during the 1970s, shortly after Shidoni Foundry opened in Tesuque. Working in slab clay, she built sculptures that were cast in bronze, each unique, including the patinas that she personally applied. They are intimate, planar pieces that reflect the hand of an explorer in the world of formal expression. And as ‘Peace in our Time’ suggests, Janet was a global thinker whose work continues to resonate with viewers today.”
During her lengthy career, Lippincott received many awards, most recently the 2002 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and the 2003 Arts Achievement Award from the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
‘Love for the land’
“Elmer Schooley loved to paint and it shows,” said Meyer East Gallery director Kent Whipple. “He created large (80-inch-by-90-inch) landscape paintings covered with tens of thousands of small dots. Layer upon layers of intense radiant color on each canvas have stood the test of time, placing more than 20 paintings in museum collections through the world.”
Despite their contemplative, eccentric and unique ambiance, Schooley’s pictures are firmly rooted in the history of modern art, Whipple said. The application of small dabs of color came straight from the late 19th-century pointillists Georges Seurat (1859-1891) and Paul Signac (1963-1935). Schooley also borrowed compositional elements and painting techniques from the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The roots of Schooley’s overall patterns and field-oriented visual effects can be traced back to Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947).
The retrospective features a cross-section of lithographs, drawings and woodblock prints, which offer a perspective of the artist as a draftsman. However, it is his large works that will intrigue and enthrall the viewer. Showing grasses or a barren grove of winter trees, each image glows with shimmering light and the physical texture of paint. “His painstaking work reflects a true love for the land and a passion for the land and a passion for the application of oil paint on a surface,” Whipple noted. “The results of his labor envelop the viewer with an energy verging on the spiritual. Like actual landscapes, these paintings change in front of the viewer’s eyes. As if affected by cloud shadows or a moving sun, whole areas move from cool to warm while viewer focus shifts around the canvas. When standing completely still, the viewer is surrounded by quiet, luminescent transformation. Like a slight but urgent breeze, Schooley tricks his audience into seeing motion where there is only the stillness of his singular vision.”
A teacher and painter
Elmer W. “Skinny” Schooley was born in 1916 in Lawrence, Kan., the third of four sons. His family lived in Oklahoma during his childhood, moving to Colorado during the great depression. After high school, Schooley enrolled in the University of Colorado, where he majored in art and worked his way through college as a truck driver. In Boulder he fell in love with a fellow art major, Gertrude “Gussie” Rogers, and spent one summer as a ranch hand working on her family’s ranch near Westcliffe, Colo. They married in September 1941 before leaving for the University of Iowa, where they each earned a master of fine arts degree.
Schooley enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942, went to officer candidate school and served in the South Pacific theater and later Japan. After the war they moved to Silver City in January 1946, where Schooley taught art at Western New Mexico College. In 1947, Schooley joined the art department of New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas. He convinced the university to get its first lithography press, a medium he practiced for many years in addition to wood blocks and etching. However, he settled on oil painting as his favored medium and rarely did any printmaking in his later asses in all media in addition to art history. He was head of the art department for many years before retiring early in 1978 to devote himself full-time to painting. Both Gussie and Skinny were predominantly landscape painters, for which they were well-known.
Schooley’s 30-year career as a teacher at Highlands University allowed him to develop the first art library in the area as well as the first lithography workshop in the state. He also founded the university gallery.
Just prior to Schooley’s retirement, Gussie applied for, and received grants for them in the Roswell artist-in-residence program. The couple resettled there. Their careers blossomed in retirement as they devoted most of their time to painting. For many years he painted very large landscapes: 7 by 8 feet. He exhibited extensively. Schooley’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; the Albuquerque Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and numerous private collections.
If You Go
WHAT: Shows of work by Janet Lippincott and Elmer Schooley
WHEN: Lippincott: today through May 22; Schooley: today through May 2
WHERE: Karan Ruhlen Gallery and Meyer East Gallery, both at 225 Canyon Road
CONTACT: Ruhlen: 820-0807; Meyer East: 983-1657
