Jon Schueler (1916–1992)

intensity and identity

Mary A. Caws

pp. 277-299

in: Monika Szuba, Julian Wolfreys (eds), The poetics of space and place in Scottish literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

"I found every passion in the sky," Schueler writes in his magnificent autobiography, The Sound of Sleat. This essay is about his writing and his painting, the two arts inseparable for this author. It deals with his cloudscapes and seascapes and earthscapes, but above all with his passion for that part of Scotland in Mallaig Vaig and across to the Isle of Skye. For focus, it concentrates on the period of 1958–1959, when he found his first studio there. Each fragment thereof feels complete in its witness to the search for identity Schueler undertook with such intensity throughout his lifetime, in Scotland and America, through art and jazz and living. We might call it a sky song, providing that music takes into itself so much else.