It's funny, there’s something about Brett Scheifflee’s paintings. They kind of evade words. They’re very quiet. Quiet pictures. Quiet moods. Softened colors. But, still they speak to you. And, they’re damn poetic.
Then I came across Brett’s painting, Burkowski’s Bluebird. A small, simple painting of a bluebird on a branch. Influenced by Charles Burkowski’s poem, Bluebird. It gave me an entry point. Bluebird is a fragile little poem about the vulnerable, and often silent, capacity in each of us to delicately hold the simple things we find beautiful. And, in some ways, that helps say it about Brett’s paintings.
He paints the things you don't usually need to say aloud. Precious pauses for the admission of beauty. You see something, and somehow want to write a poem. You want to see the sunset with someone. If you tried to say it aloud you couldn't. Your words would tangle up, and you’d lose the point.
How do you adequately depict that thing? That sunset. A lone tractor, harvesting in the evening. Summer haze. Winter fog. Rolling waves sand dark, salty, and eternal. What about the perfectly round moon reflected in a grassy back bay marsh?
Brett has a wonderful sense for these views. He goes right to it. Paint the moon. Paint the grass. Paint the sky going blue purple pink. Put the moon mid canvas, because that's what the picture is about. He is one of those artists who make depicting the landscape look perfectly plain, natural, and also very heartfelt. Get to those picturesque moments. It takes a keen eye for the job of depicting nature, and a keen feel for the emotional core of a landscape.
You want to see these kinds of paintings on the wall. Color on the surface. Easel sized. A good picture, wrangled well. And, in a very real sense, that's what you understand paintings to be. The language, and tools of observation used to put together a lovely vision.
Brett Scheifflee was born in Buffalo, NY, and somehow I think of Hudson River School artists. Well honed depiction. Skill imbued with the romance of wonder. The lovely vision.
And so, from Burkowski to someone like Frederic Edwin Church. There’s a lot of Church in Scheifflee’s paintings.
Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics, and Sheifflee’s May Rainbows. Double rainbow paintings. Church shows two rainbows in rainy mist over tropical mountains. The picture is grounded by foliage, and figures in the lower right. It's the kind of picture that could easily go candy colored, but this landscape is tonal. Gray and rocky. Color in the painting is carefully reserved for a few spots where the rainbows weave out of the mist.
Sheifflee’s double rainbows function the same way. A strip of green marsh for weight. Tonal composition, but the rainbows give color to nature's magic. By reflecting the rainbows in still water, Scheifflee cleverly turns the arcs on their side, and the whole image hovers in the ether.
Church’s Mount Kathadin from Millinocket Camp, and Scheifflee’s Small Mouth Morning, both have boats, and background mountains. The horizons are high, in the top half of the compositions. But, tone and color carry the action to the bottom of the pictures. By reflecting skies in water the artists put the weight in the foreground. In Church’s painting it is a woodsy shoreline. In Scheifflee’s, it’s a jon boat tied up at a dock.
Another trait comparable to Church is Sheifflee’s sense of travel. An oeuvre like an artist's visual travelogue. The portfolio on Scheifflee’s website is categorized by location. Eastern paintings, and western paintings. The American landscape. A man goes places, and paints them. An artist who can't help but find romance in the landscape wherever he is. East to west, and mountain to marsh.
One of my favorite books is Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels. I look at it often. It has a magnificent collection of imagery that follows Kahn’s work around the US and pairs it with musings by the artist about making art from place to place.
Now Brett Scheifflee, and Wolf Kahn work in different types of painting. Different handling and mark making, different hierarchy in picture. Something, overly simplified, like modernist v realist. But their sense of the journey is the same. Both landscape painters. Both travelers with ties to NY. But, the closeness in their vision is most striking. Their acute eye for gauses of color that make the landscape feel enterable. Then they develop the vision with a careful balance of shape, harmony, and vibe.
And, well, with something akin to those Hudson River painters, and a vision approaching the eyes of Wolf Kahn, can you ask for any more from a landscape painter?
And isn't that cool. I often think it's remarkable to paint today. The joyful, if crushingly daunting, task of drawing influence from, and creating within, art reference available from everywhere and everytime.
Keep that in mind for a second, and I'd like to mention Charles Burkowski again.
I first came across Bukowski's poems on Youtube. There are lots of these little videos. His poems are narrated. Sometimes with the text running on the screen. Sometimes with slow-mo clips, or color-faded inspirational scenes. The poems lend themselves well to phone videos as a medium. Maybe it's that they’re not too difficult, maybe un-stuffy, or some kind of sweet and sour middlebrow. I'm sure I'm not the only guy who gets inspired by these things. They're nice little everyday passages of the thoughtful and dear.
I first saw Brett Scheifflee’s paintings on Instagram. Then I saw them in person at Robert Lange Studios, in Charleston. I see them within something of a new era in realism, and in the hard business of painting. There are artists out there making it work, and doing so within their own power of sight.
People may find art they like just by surfing their interests. An artist with grind may find an audience for their work without hustling traditional art world gatekeepers.
Now, every new way will come with pitfalls. Social media algorithms are maddening. Is the potentially great artist's creativity sidelined by attention grabbism, and content creation? And, for what it is, trading curators for tech billionaires sounds pretty scary. But, I love galleries like RLS, and work like Brett Scheifflee’s. They're unencumbered by the leaden, and frequently suffocating, maxims too often found in high art spaces.
Look all around. Find art wherever you can. You artists, get down to the work of making good paintings. Use paint to make a poem about a landscape. Make things of beauty, and make doing that your life.
I can't wait to get down to Charleston this week and meet Brett. We have a duet show, opening Friday, at RLS. So, I’ve had his paintings on my mind.
It's been an artistic challenge. You're going to put your paintings on the wall beside talent and skill, you have to show up well. Guess I can't just phone this one in can I?
That's what I said to my wife when we got the invite to the show.
Brett’s painting Comes in Threes popped in my head. I showed it to her. He's an ace painter. Look at this one. It's more than a beautiful painting.
Waves crashing, rolling, since time began. These waves, like every single wave before them, rise for a moment from the sandy bottom Atlantic. The moment is bot by tiny and epically unending. And in there, you find a childhood memory. Standing, ankles in cool foam, watching waves coming to you, imagining and studying, giving them personalities, giving them names, counting them. Those heavy waves can push you around. Push you at your legs, and at your middle. Hours of fun on summer days. Hours of love walking the shoreline hand in hand. Hours of anxiety as the hurricane surge inches closer. Stong, emotional, dreamy, poetic.
But, in the end, what can I say? It does exactly what all really good paintings do. I can't really sum it up in words. And, I kind of think, that's one of the best things you can say about a painting. I don't know. It's on the wall. Just be quiet, and look at it. That's what it's there for.
Then I came across Brett’s painting, Burkowski’s Bluebird. A small, simple painting of a bluebird on a branch. Influenced by Charles Burkowski’s poem, Bluebird. It gave me an entry point. Bluebird is a fragile little poem about the vulnerable, and often silent, capacity in each of us to delicately hold the simple things we find beautiful. And, in some ways, that helps say it about Brett’s paintings.
He paints the things you don't usually need to say aloud. Precious pauses for the admission of beauty. You see something, and somehow want to write a poem. You want to see the sunset with someone. If you tried to say it aloud you couldn't. Your words would tangle up, and you’d lose the point.
How do you adequately depict that thing? That sunset. A lone tractor, harvesting in the evening. Summer haze. Winter fog. Rolling waves sand dark, salty, and eternal. What about the perfectly round moon reflected in a grassy back bay marsh?
Brett has a wonderful sense for these views. He goes right to it. Paint the moon. Paint the grass. Paint the sky going blue purple pink. Put the moon mid canvas, because that's what the picture is about. He is one of those artists who make depicting the landscape look perfectly plain, natural, and also very heartfelt. Get to those picturesque moments. It takes a keen eye for the job of depicting nature, and a keen feel for the emotional core of a landscape.
You want to see these kinds of paintings on the wall. Color on the surface. Easel sized. A good picture, wrangled well. And, in a very real sense, that's what you understand paintings to be. The language, and tools of observation used to put together a lovely vision.
Brett Scheifflee was born in Buffalo, NY, and somehow I think of Hudson River School artists. Well honed depiction. Skill imbued with the romance of wonder. The lovely vision.
And so, from Burkowski to someone like Frederic Edwin Church. There’s a lot of Church in Scheifflee’s paintings.
Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics, and Sheifflee’s May Rainbows. Double rainbow paintings. Church shows two rainbows in rainy mist over tropical mountains. The picture is grounded by foliage, and figures in the lower right. It's the kind of picture that could easily go candy colored, but this landscape is tonal. Gray and rocky. Color in the painting is carefully reserved for a few spots where the rainbows weave out of the mist.
Sheifflee’s double rainbows function the same way. A strip of green marsh for weight. Tonal composition, but the rainbows give color to nature's magic. By reflecting the rainbows in still water, Scheifflee cleverly turns the arcs on their side, and the whole image hovers in the ether.
Church’s Mount Kathadin from Millinocket Camp, and Scheifflee’s Small Mouth Morning, both have boats, and background mountains. The horizons are high, in the top half of the compositions. But, tone and color carry the action to the bottom of the pictures. By reflecting skies in water the artists put the weight in the foreground. In Church’s painting it is a woodsy shoreline. In Scheifflee’s, it’s a jon boat tied up at a dock.
Another trait comparable to Church is Sheifflee’s sense of travel. An oeuvre like an artist's visual travelogue. The portfolio on Scheifflee’s website is categorized by location. Eastern paintings, and western paintings. The American landscape. A man goes places, and paints them. An artist who can't help but find romance in the landscape wherever he is. East to west, and mountain to marsh.
One of my favorite books is Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels. I look at it often. It has a magnificent collection of imagery that follows Kahn’s work around the US and pairs it with musings by the artist about making art from place to place.
Now Brett Scheifflee, and Wolf Kahn work in different types of painting. Different handling and mark making, different hierarchy in picture. Something, overly simplified, like modernist v realist. But their sense of the journey is the same. Both landscape painters. Both travelers with ties to NY. But, the closeness in their vision is most striking. Their acute eye for gauses of color that make the landscape feel enterable. Then they develop the vision with a careful balance of shape, harmony, and vibe.
And, well, with something akin to those Hudson River painters, and a vision approaching the eyes of Wolf Kahn, can you ask for any more from a landscape painter?
And isn't that cool. I often think it's remarkable to paint today. The joyful, if crushingly daunting, task of drawing influence from, and creating within, art reference available from everywhere and everytime.
Keep that in mind for a second, and I'd like to mention Charles Burkowski again.
I first came across Bukowski's poems on Youtube. There are lots of these little videos. His poems are narrated. Sometimes with the text running on the screen. Sometimes with slow-mo clips, or color-faded inspirational scenes. The poems lend themselves well to phone videos as a medium. Maybe it's that they’re not too difficult, maybe un-stuffy, or some kind of sweet and sour middlebrow. I'm sure I'm not the only guy who gets inspired by these things. They're nice little everyday passages of the thoughtful and dear.
I first saw Brett Scheifflee’s paintings on Instagram. Then I saw them in person at Robert Lange Studios, in Charleston. I see them within something of a new era in realism, and in the hard business of painting. There are artists out there making it work, and doing so within their own power of sight.
People may find art they like just by surfing their interests. An artist with grind may find an audience for their work without hustling traditional art world gatekeepers.
Now, every new way will come with pitfalls. Social media algorithms are maddening. Is the potentially great artist's creativity sidelined by attention grabbism, and content creation? And, for what it is, trading curators for tech billionaires sounds pretty scary. But, I love galleries like RLS, and work like Brett Scheifflee’s. They're unencumbered by the leaden, and frequently suffocating, maxims too often found in high art spaces.
Look all around. Find art wherever you can. You artists, get down to the work of making good paintings. Use paint to make a poem about a landscape. Make things of beauty, and make doing that your life.
I can't wait to get down to Charleston this week and meet Brett. We have a duet show, opening Friday, at RLS. So, I’ve had his paintings on my mind.
It's been an artistic challenge. You're going to put your paintings on the wall beside talent and skill, you have to show up well. Guess I can't just phone this one in can I?
That's what I said to my wife when we got the invite to the show.
Brett’s painting Comes in Threes popped in my head. I showed it to her. He's an ace painter. Look at this one. It's more than a beautiful painting.
Waves crashing, rolling, since time began. These waves, like every single wave before them, rise for a moment from the sandy bottom Atlantic. The moment is bot by tiny and epically unending. And in there, you find a childhood memory. Standing, ankles in cool foam, watching waves coming to you, imagining and studying, giving them personalities, giving them names, counting them. Those heavy waves can push you around. Push you at your legs, and at your middle. Hours of fun on summer days. Hours of love walking the shoreline hand in hand. Hours of anxiety as the hurricane surge inches closer. Stong, emotional, dreamy, poetic.
But, in the end, what can I say? It does exactly what all really good paintings do. I can't really sum it up in words. And, I kind of think, that's one of the best things you can say about a painting. I don't know. It's on the wall. Just be quiet, and look at it. That's what it's there for.
