Image size of print is 24 X 27 inches with ample margins

MY GOLDEN AGE by Elmer Schooley

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.