Image size of this print is 24 x 27

HOT COUNTRY by Elmer Schooley, The Munson Gallery,Santa Fe ,NM.

Elmer Schooley's landscapes build upon his decades-long artistic celebration and quest for union with Nature. Schooley's unrelieved desire to vividly praise his subject belies the knowledge that the reality of the natural is an elusive quest, and that the concept of nature is one of our most complex cultural inheritances. Signs of the artist�s character are suggested through his liaison with nature sustained by degrees of submission, apprehension and solicitude.

Chastened by a Calvinist ethos of work, and, by now a couple of years into his eighth decade, he walks the few yards each day, as he has for over twenty years, to work in his Roswell studio. When I'm not painting, he says, there's no use in my life. Softening the bluntness of that, he admits, "What's holy in life is nature and art.

Schooley shares a wide intellectual and in-the-field knowledge of natural history with his wife of more than fifty years, the artist Gussie du Jardin. Many earlier years of roaming the mountains of the West fed the couple's passion for high places, and the wildflowers found there, of which they identified some rare types. Schooley readily identifies all plant life in his paintings. But the experiences of hiking those mountains, and schussing a few while on Ski Patrol, left indelible memories of picturesque vistas above timberline, and thin-aired, hallucinatory reveries. He recalls moments in which the feeling of being absorbed in and by nature overtook him. Times like that, I wasn't even sure I existed but then you can only leave your skin for moments. Schooley's recollection has about it the aspect of an encounter with the sublime, where the senses are left behind as the mind gropes to understand what it cannot contain. Such memories enrich the resonant ground of absorbed experience within his paintings where the attentive viewer can experience realistic allusions leading to subjective emotions.

A portion of the wonder of Schooley's paintings is how effectively they override the Southwest's ornery, arid, bristliest by sheer cumulative luxuriance, while at the same time defying our notions of the commonplace. Guided by instinct and memory, he stalks the idea of each painting near the edge of the banal; and the course of his prolonged meditative focus irradiates the mundane and earthly. His drive to celebrate the landscape achieves a sentience that challenges the limits of terrestrial with undiluted sensuality.

The particularities of Schooley's mature style are in part the result of a striving to understand the experience of being in and of nature in which he sees himself as irrevocable participant. The pursuit, and his striving to make sense of the histories of Euroipean and American painting, in terms of his own work, is the dominating rigors in his life. He privileges the structural organization of the picture plain rather than mere representation, working from particular visual memories. He employs color for its plastic effects, to attain chromatic form and mood. His large-scale paintings totally fill the sight, approximating environmental scale.

The cumulative power of Schooley's landscapes is intensified through their organization and compositional design. Relying primarily on recollection, he paints directly on the prepared grounds of his canvases without studies or sketches. Structural features in Schooley�s paintings appeal to the intellect, providing a dynamic complement that balances the force of rhythmic repetition. In contrast, the amplitude of his tactile details generates a sense of rhythm that is deeper than cognition-like wind moving through dry grass, or a noon breeze through a forest.

Schooley credits Eliot Porter's color photographs as a lasting influence. He first saw them in the early 1960's, and they helped him understand more about how natural light and chromatic color can generate visual form. In the same period, he encountered the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and began the long process of understanding that master's approach to interpreting subject matter (motif), and a working method that applies broken color with the most unassuming means. Schooley worked consciously to shed art school training that had enforces a graphic, chiaroscuro approach to form. Through Bonnard's example he realized how to create form with color rather than contrast. Bonnard's strongest influence on Schooley's work, Schooley says, is his use of color to express materiality rather than contour.

A complex range of contrasting dynamics is visible in the recent works. AS Schooley's memory delivers us subtle delineations of place and mood, the tenor of the works� emotional space has increased. Since music has been Schooley's lifelong inspirations-in earlier years he enjoyed playing the violin-cello-a musical analogy may be applied here: it is as if the timbre, and tone of the artist's voice has gained in strata of expressive capacity, while at the same time the qualities that distinguish it from any other grow more distinct and unmistakable