Dena Schutzer: Agitation and Retreat
Feet First—Beach, 2024, 20×16 inches, oil on board.
A couple of weeks ago, Dena Schutzer and I sat down in a zoom call and talked about her work for her upcoming show, Agitation and Retreat.
Eileen Mooney: You know, when I first joined the gallery, there were a few artists whose work were my favorites, and the buildings that you had up on the Bowery website were definitely among those favorites. I just love the buildings. So when I opened the Google folder to look at your work for your upcoming show, I saw more buildings, so I am excited to be able to talk about those with you. Tell me more about that body of work.
Dena Schutzer: Those were the first paintings I started working on when I retired from teaching painting recently. They are massive, glass cantilevered, luxury buildings that were constructed along the Hudson River across the street from the school that I worked at. I watched and painted them going up over the years and always had mixed feelings about them. Though I was attracted to their angles and visual surprises, the wealth and power they represented was overwhelming and disheartening. They do have a few apartments set aside for lower income tenants but those tenants have to use a “poor door” for access to their apartments.
Eileen Mooney: Yikes.
Buildings and Yellow Cloud, 2024, 12×12 inches, oil on canvas.
Dena Schutzer: So then, later on, when I retired, I revisited these buildings and I was looking at them in a different way. I was thinking that I am free, not bound by time spent at work, and what does freedom look like in my painting now? And so the same buildings that looked menacing to me earlier now started looking playful in a way. I know that's a cliche and an easy shot, but with all these facets on the building I was able to see the reflections of clouds and sky like a kaleidoscope. Were the clouds behind the buildings, or a reflection? So it went from menacing to playful, and actually helped me free up the space.
Eileen Mooney: That’s exactly what strikes me with those paintings. I would never have guessed about all of the sociological underpinnings of this work–the socioeconomic classes that you were observing in and around the construction of and who gets to dwell in the buildings. But I'm struck by the geometry and the reflective surfaces, and the ability to play with it in that cubist kind of way, this sense of space and shape. Is the cloud in the front or is it behind? The compelling ambiguity of, “What am I looking at here?” There's just so much of that in New York, you know. You could go on and on forever, probably, making paintings like that and finding interesting compositions all over town.
Construction—Purple Shadow, 2023, 12×16 inches, oil on canvas.
Schutzer: Well, this brings up a question I often ask myself about how much invention I can allow myself. I really am motivated by working from observation and specifically falling in love with something I am looking at, and often struggle to find the right balance between expression and invention in my translation. I just adore the accidents in real life. Oh, and it gets back to invention. So I don't feel like I invent anything because I am seeing and being responsive. I had been asking myself if I really was free, I would be able to invent. For example, I asked John Goodrich. I said, “I know you work perceptually, but how much of your work is invention?” He responded, “Everything is invention.”
Eileen Moooney: Wow. Welp–I’m going to take that quote with me into my still life sessions for probably years to come. Thank you, John! It’s an interesting dichotomy between reality and invention. Being true to reality, and yet, reconstructing it in a painting through invention. Come to think of it, breaking it down like that, invention might actually be necessary.
Dena Schutzer: When I paint, I ask myself what is that thing that catches my eye and that I am reacting to? I tend to find a scene, or image that has an organic kind of organization to it already–or emotional content that could drive an image. And this, I think, comes from the fact that I used to do a lot of street photography. I always drew, but I also really love catching the moment on a street, or in reality with photography. This probably comes from the fact that my father was a photojournalist for Life Magazine and as a child I grew up with this visual language. His name was Paul Schutzer, and he was killed covering the Six Day War (1967) in the Middle East, but I lived and learned from his spirit of catching the moment and the drama in reality as a child. And my husband, Ralph Gabriner, is an exciting photographer with a quick and sensitive eye and the adventurous seeing and sharing just continues. My mother also always drew throughout her life and would continuously point things out to me to notice. When she was in her nineties, she loved walking and often stopped people on the street, telling them to look up from their phones and notice the sunset. She said, “They’d say, ‘oh yes, that’s pretty,’ and then go back to their phones.”
Four Men Working, 2023, 18×20 inches, oil on canvas.
Dena Schutzer: (continued) This got me very alert to hunting for imagery. That leads me to mention that when I looked at these paintings from the last 2 or 3 years to select ones for the show, I thought that I'm all over the place, subject-wise. But I don't feel all over the place. I feel genuinely connected to each thing I'm looking at and responding to. So what is it? What is the through line that might unite the work? What I decided is that each thing I look at requires a different response. And so the styles may be approached differently. The subject matter may be different, but responding honestly to what I'm seeing and how to best convey it and translate it into paint is what has always been a consistent goal for me. But I have this kind of tension between looking carefully and falling in love with what I'm seeing, and then painting it guided by my emotional responses. So that's how I'm explaining invention.
Gloves (Horizontal), 2024, 12×16 inches, oil on canvas.
Eileen Mooney: Well I'm really glad that you mentioned not only invention, but also the through line in your work, because it actually reminds me of something I was going to ask about. What I saw in the Google folder appeared to be a rather wide range of subject matter. You have the buildings, the construction workers, some much more intimate figurative work, and then a couple of still lifes of disposable gloves. What was interesting to me, after cycling through all of your work and returning to the buildings, was that, across all of your subject matter, there is one commonality–the surface of the picture plane. The manner in which you paint all of these things actually feels very connected. The way in which you are painting for instance, a foot, or a person reclining in their hospital bed, or a reflection of a cloud on a skyscraper, or the way that you are mark making with the trees in that rainy, foggy cityscape with all the lights and the yellow tree. By the way, that piece is probably my favorite painting in that whole group. You really captured the drama of the contrast between the rain and fog that are muting the landscape, yet the colors that prevail–the high key of the yellow tree, the brake lights, and the bright green of the reflective highway sign.
Nevertheless, to me, the way that you use your mark making almost feels like a collection of pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The marks seem to fit together in an interlocking whole, and I do not think that I would have noticed this if you didn’t treat every subject this way across all of your work. I definitely do not do this in my work, and it is interesting that you do. It really unifies the whole body of work, almost as a statement on the juxtaposition between the abstract composition of the piece and the what that you're painting.
Highway and GW Bridge, 2023, 12×12 inches, oil on canvas
Dena Schutzer: Hmm, thank you for this beautiful perception of seeing my paintings this way. You said jigsaw puzzle, which I love because I think it relates to how I think about free space. My teacher, Paul Georges, talked about free space and how every shape should be a complete shape. And to continue about free space, Fernand Leger said something like, “You can paint swimmers but can you make the painting swim?”
Eileen Mooney: With respect to the rainy city scene with the cars, the traffic, and everything looking at it right now, where were you when you painted that? Were you inside looking out a window?
Dena Schutzer: No, I was driving to work in the morning, stuck in traffic, and it hit me. The off-balance tree, the bridge, what can you see and what can't you see because of the early morning fog and the emotional contribution of the traffic. I took a quick photograph while I was driving. Just felt emblematic to me of a moment. I try to use what comes my way.
Eileen Mooney: Of course. That makes sense.
Arm Outstretched, 2023, 12×16 inches, oil on canvas.
Dena Schutzer: You referenced the paintings of disposable gloves. The gloves had meaning for me: the crumpled fingers of my painting gloves lying on my chair reminded me of my mother’s arthritic hands. I saw it not as a sad thing, but as something I wanted to look closely at and spend time with. My mom was full of life, but she knew she only had several weeks to live, and she was very grateful for the time. When I was with her when she bathed she would say, “Go, get your paints. Be Bonnard.” She was a wonderful artist herself. She embraced what was happening to her at the end of life with courage and humor. Her view was, she was 91 and a half, and she said, “What more could I expect? Any more time is icing on the cake”. And so we were embracing all of the things that were involved with it. And so her hands were very arthritic, and when I looked at my crumpled up gloves sitting wherever I left them, it really reminded me of her fingers, her hands. Some of the objects that I've painted over the years are stand-ins for things that were going on emotionally with me in my life at that time. And I saw it not as a sad thing, but as something that I wanted to look closely at. And then it embodied a little drama and felt meaningful to paint.
The Bath, 2023, 16×20 inches, oil on board.
Eileen Mooney: Wow.
Dena Schutzer: And my mother really did teach me to embrace the things that come at you, and fight what you can. When she saw my painting of her in the bath, she commented that she liked the way I included her bald spot. She was always very honest and direct, and that helped me.
Eileen Mooney: When I saw those images I thought to myself that this must have been a very unique, special experience. To be in the room, painting somebody in, you know, this kind of experience. The final stage of their life. It doesn’t say so in the titles of your work, but I had assumed that she was your mother.
[a pause]
Dena Schutzer: It was a collaboration with her.
Eileen Mooney: That's beautiful–a beautiful experience to have been able to share with your mother. Did you make the paintings directly from your drawings?
Dena Schutzer: I drew her frequently, and always showed it to her, and she would critique it insightfully. But the painting part, I did the paintings from my photographs and my own drawings of her.
Eileen Mooney: That's incredible.
Dena Schutzer: So humor is also very much a part of things I think about when I paint. I tend to be attracted to the quirkiness and the humor in things. Reality has so much that's so theatrical; the motifs are everywhere.
In the Light, 2025, 24×20 inches, oil on canvas.
Dena Schutzer’s Agitation and Retreat, is on view at Bowery Gallery from April 22 to May 17, 2025. The opening reception is on Thursday, April 24, from 5-8pm.
