JSS blog article on “Seymour Remenick, An Appreciation” by Stuart Shils

Seymour Remenick

 

Excellent post by Rebecca Harp over at the Jerusalem Studio School Blog,
“Seymour Remenick, An Appreciation” by Stuart Shils” where she posts an essay written by Stuart Shils about his former teacher, Seymour Remenick, 1923-1999. There was a recent show at the Lancaster Museum of Art. The show is no longer up but you can see some online images of the show here.

 

This excerpt from Stuart Shils essay was particularly thought provoking…

… “With years of teaching, Seymour’s verbal and theoretical skills were sharp, and in his last decade he began a series of writings and “letters to a friend,” examining the anatomy of the perceptual encounter and the young painter’s position within the wider world beyond his or her easel. I remember an art collector trying vainly to convince me that the noblest pursuit in painting was the human portrait – and not the landscape, which to him by contrast was always changing and most of all, too ordinary. He proclaimed that the face was morally superior because “the eyes are the windows to the soul, and who had ever seen a stone wall with a soul?” Seymour, who also knew the collector quite well, had no patience for this man’s anti-visual idealizations. He understood that a wall was never just a wall, and that the real issue for the painter’s eye was: how is the wall seen, felt and then translated into expressive form? As a painter and as a teacher, he aspired to shape, with precision and eloquence, impassioned response within the perceptual moment. And within that state of grace, for half a century, brush in hand, Seymour Remenick revealed a tangible glimpse of something very much akin to “soul”.”

Also if you haven’t yet seen it, Rebecca also recently posted a fabulous interview, In the Studio with Catherine Kehoe. Catherine for anyone who might not already know is leading still life painter and runs the stellar blog: Painting: Powers of Observation. You can visit her website here.

I’m currently working on and will be posting an interview with Stuart Shils as well as showing some of his recent work sometime next week. More to come soon.