Myra Schuetter’s Not-So-Still Lifes
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| Listen |
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| I Should Have Stopped with the Animals |
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| Devil's in the Details |
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| Break Out |
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| Distortion vs. Transparency (detail) |
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| Distortion vs. Transparency |
By Tom Wachunas
Hopefully, we are seeing a time in our history when people are beginning to break out of their “molds” and are able to be the people they are and want to be…What helps one segment of our society helps all of us. – Myra Schuetter
EXHIBIT: We’ve Got Issues: Watercolors by Myra Schuetter
/ at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue North,
Canton / THROUGH JULY 3, 2021 / Facemasks required–
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Myra Schuetter is a
native of Jasper, Indiana. For the past 40 years or so she’s been honing her
considerable skills as a watercolorist working in a meticulously realistic style.
Her complex and intricate compositions are executed with a commanding exactitude
of details and exquisite color dynamics that are nothing short of astonishing.
These very large watercolor
paintings – you could rightly call them heroic in scale - are in one sense
still lifes. They’re also allegories, populated by lots of toys and action
figures. At first you might think that the paintings are children’s tales, or
memories, or perhaps tailored to a child’s perspective.
So on yet another
level, the paintings are narratives. These elaborate visual stories are
actually very grown-up commentaries and observations that often speak to the
social and political sturm und drang of our troubled time and place. Schuetter
effectively explains what inspired them in the placards posted with each
painting.
For her 2016 work, I
Should Have Stopped with the Animals, the artist recalled an occasion of
talking with her husband about the state of the world. At one point in the conversation he had asked,
"Do you think God ever said, 'Maybe I should have stopped with the
animals’?" The various toy figures in the painting are engaged in a war,
all transpiring on and around a large Bible, opened to the Book of Genesis (the
story of creation and the end of Eden). Not to be irreverent, but the husband’s
inspiring question does remind me a bit of Mark Twain’s glib suggestion to God that,
“… the human being is another disappointment and… is no considerable
improvement upon the monkey.”
Distortion vs.
Transparency is an especially intriguing work from 2012, prompted by
Schuetter’s recollection of the terribly contentious public meetings in her
city where her husband was once the chairman of the Utilities Services
Board. The meetings were held to determine a feasible alternative to the city’s
outmoded coal-fired power plant.
In technique alone,
particularly in the way Schuetter renders a variety of colored glass vessels (a ‘transparency” that tends to emphasize or exaggerate the words visible behind
the vessels ) and the shadows they cast, the painting is a tour de force. It’s
a three-tiered essay of sorts. The characters arranged in the top row represent
a pompous, loud and angry faction spreading misinformation. The middle row
presents more reasonable folks, sincerely seeking a viable solution, while the
bottom row presents what the artist calls the trusting “silent majority.”
In the border that
frames the painting called Listen, that same word appears in 57
languages. Meanwhile the image shows a diverse crowd of confrontational characters
holding protest signs. In her comments on the work, Schuetter has written, “…For
all of our arguing, conflict and anger, no one is listening to the “other side,”…getting
to know the other side and truly listening to them usually doesn’t happen…”
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