A mid-career artist, Christie Scheele has been painting devotedly since receiving her BFA in 1980, and began exhibiting and selling her work in 1985. While getting her BFA, she spent a year on fellowship at the Royal Academy of Fine Art and the University Complutense of Madrid in 1978-79.
She started painting her atmospheric, minimalist landscapes just before moving to the Catskills from New York City in 1990. As a non-regional landscape painter, Ms. Scheele paints images, in her signature style, of all of the places she has ever been. Among her favorite locales are the beaches and marshes of the Northeast, the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, and the highways and bridge views of the Hudson Valley and New York City metro area. These meditative pieces cross the boundaries between traditional realism and the contemporary art world, reaching the viewer’s heart without sentimentality or melodrama.
As a full-time, painter, Christie Scheele’s work has been collected nationally and internationally by hundreds of private and public collectors. These collections include the Queens Museum of Art, the Dorsky Museum, the Tyler Museum of Art, American Airlines, Waterford Crystal, Elaine Kamarck, Kelsey and Camille Grammer, and Howard and Ellen Greenberg. Her paintings were featured in the film “Broken Flowers” (in the scene with Jessica Lange) and “Perfect Strangers” on the set of the Halle Barry character; have appeared in Architectural Digest; and have been written about and reviewed extensively in the Hudson Valley and beyond.
Land and water use have been political since the beginning of our time on earth. As these issues become increasingly critical, I have been catapulted ---but also eased, nestled--- into expanding the environmental discussion that until now has been mostly implied in my work, putting into context my decades-long celebration of the powerful beauty of our planet.
My new Atlas Project maps my work while mapping the world, revealing a web of meaning around and between the individual pieces that I create. The matrix that connects all of my landscape imagery is saturated with memory, both personal and collective. To show these connections, I am working in one thematic grouping at a time, creating a legend, or site map, to each body of work. The Site Map is a key both to a given installation and to the region or theme that it explores.
The Site Map for Atlas/Hudson River Valley, the first of these exhibitions, opening March 31st at Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham, NY, is created with collage on a Rand McNally road map of the river and our region. It contains numbered mini-monotypes of all of the oil paintings on view and corresponding map tacks showing the locale depicted on the map. Extensions of the Site Map include Mapping Memory, lino/mono prints of regional flora and fauna with written personal observations; a collaged and monoprinted map of the source of the river in the Adirondacks; a collage of the Hudson Canyon, extending 400 miles out to sea from NY Harbor; and a fourth extension discussing climate change and local impacts.
Using drawing, printmaking, pasteling, writing, and mixed-media along with oil paintings, I am exploring the interrelationships of process, history, and memory. These are revealed not only by air, land, and water but also by my materials and personal history as an artist, family and community member, and frequent inhabitant of the outdoor world.
The first energy and ideas for this project evolved in 2016. That fall, experiencing profound grief over election results and their potential to set policy that will accelerate climate change, I was also contemplating a scheduled residency on Nantucket in February of 2017, and my upcoming 60th birthday later on that year. The second two factors prompted a question---how do I want to expand and deepen my range as an artist? The first, my accelerating concern over the health of our planet, gave me direction.
About a year and a half later, I am still finding myself repeatedly in new terrain that demands fresh problem solving. It is a very rich process, artistically, entering a new world as you are creating it, and also full of the discomfort of facing the unkown. My upcoming groupings will include Atlas/Forms of Water, and Atlas/Cape Cod, the former creating overlap with the place-based themes. I alternate between focusing on aspects of this work that I am currently inventing and my continued immersion in my open, spacious landscape paintings, looking to draw it all together into a cohesive whole, mirroring the wholeness of life on earth.
The single most distinctive aspect to what I do as a landscape painter lies in my ability to reduce a scene to its essentials. This gives the viewer what is important, without the distraction, or visual clutter, of too much detail. Both by providing this overview and by using soft, scumbled edges, these paintings can quiet a viewer's mind and evoke a more direct response.
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My version of minimalism is about shape and atmospherics. I paint not just the light, but the air itself, and how these affect the edges and colors of the scenes depicted.
As a non-regional landscape painter, I use images from all over the world, the many places I have been. With the right atmospherics, anything and everything can reflect a powerful beauty---from smokestack at sunset or headlights on a road to a moody thunderstorm at sea. Nearly everything I paint could exist in nature, yet most often it does not. Some of my pieces are very much about a sense of place and weather, while others speak more to formal or conceptual art making issues. I am often thinking about painterly concerns such as line, color, shape, and surface, which, following the ideas set forth by Kandinsky in "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", have direct emotional power of their own. There is also a process of continually evaluating and editing the image---what is essential? What is superfluous? The painting as a whole is what this is all about, rather than precisely and exactly capturing a given landscape.
For these reasons, I see myself as being closer to the color field paintings of Rothko than to traditional or plein air landscape painters.
More recent bodies of work deal with not only my different perspectives on what defines beauty and power in the landscape, but also with alternative viewpoints on process and presentation. To stay within the confines of the same explorations for years on end is, I feel, a sort of artistic napping. Therefore, in some pieces of these newer series my work---always aiming to both soothe and provoke---encourages more questions on the part of the viewer.
The multiple panel and multiple image pieces refer to one of my formative artistic areas of joy and comfort, the postmodern use of the grid and serial imagery. So, moving from Rothko to Agnes Martin, Chuck Close, or Louise Nevelson, these pieces have their narrative contained and framed by the grid of the frame, creating rhythm and movement to carry the story along.
In a newer series, I work on or with found objects – antique boxes, distressed cupboard doors, old slate blackboards with lovely stains and unravelings at the rim, vintage sifters, and the like. When using these objects, I adjust both my choice of imagery and the way I compose and lay in the paint to honor what is already there. I see these pieces as a collaboration between my accumulated skills and the accumulation of history that is manifested in this unique object. This feels like process that is both conceptual and deeply intuitive.
My most recent exploration, the Affinity series, with the frayed edges of the linen and graphite gridding, bring the viewer deeper into the inventions of art-making by the creation of a support that has surface interest that is not a literal part of the scene depicted. The image must, however, have an affinity for the graphite gridding and the frayed edges of the linen by either having strong linear, often manmade elements, or by being very abstract. These pieces also impart a visual discussion about focal points that goes against the traditional notions of atmospheric perspective in landscape painting. Elements, chosen by a logic intrinsic to the piece as it progresses, are emphasized by greater or lesser blurring, by heightening contrast, and by selective replacement of the gridding that I began with and painted over.
All of my work has a sense of being suspended between two breaths. Often, that feeling is palpable during the process of creation. Time is slowed, perhaps even halts for a moment, allowing us to see the world in all of its fullness.