RAiR | 1977-78
Elmer Schooley
Landscape painter and lithograph artist Elmer “Skinny” Schooley (1916-2007) was born in Lawrence, Kansas. He obtained his BFA from the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1938 and his MA in Painting at the State University of Iowa in 1942. After serving in the Air Force during World War II, Skinny taught painting and printmaking at the New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas from 1947 to 1977. He became Head of the Art Department in 1956. He founded the university gallery and the first lithographic workshop in the state. Skinny’s prints and paintings are in the collections of, amongst others, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He won over thirty art prizes between 1949 and 1964, culminating with the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in Visual Arts in 1986. After Skinny and his wife, artist Gussie DuJardin, participated in the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program from 1977-78, they permanently relocated to Roswell across from the Program’s facility. They were mentors and friends to the artists-in-residence for more than two decades. Their artworks were co-exhibited in a retrospective exhibition at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in 2003-04.
It is too pretentious to try to say in words what I am doing in paint. I do not know what I am doing in paint. I can say that, without making a conscious program for it, my painting has developed into large simple designs with a great deal of rather anonymous detail. I feel a deep relationship to my surroundings, and most of my work is born as a result of this feeling.
Painting, like the other arts, is too much talked about, written about, too much revered, too exalted and too irrelevant. A better society might take paintings and artists for granted, just as we take plumbers and teachers and farmers for granted. A painter should paint as a farmer plows his fields… not for glory, or prizes, or to appear in the books, but because this is his function and he can not help painting. - Elmer Schooley