Stephen Schatz

Stephen Schatz was born 1943 in Miami, Florida. Three years later his family moved to Fitzgerald, Georgia where his father had purchased a farm, growing cotton and tobacco. “People drove from miles around to see the only Jewish farmer in the area,” Schatz said. “I remember riding in my father’s pickup truck to deliver fresh pies my mother had made to sell at the local college cafeteria.”

 

The family later moved to Albany, Georgia where Schatz spent most of his youth and many of his adult years. Unsure of what he wanted to do with his life upon graduation he took the advice of his father and majored in biology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida with the goal of a career in oceanography.

 

Everything changed as the result of a humanities class the artist took during his sophomore year. “We were studying art history and I saw a painting by the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. I was stunned,” said Schatz. “For the first time in my life I saw a spirit that reflected my own unexpressed feelings. I had no idea that art could be a path for my life.”

 

For someone who had never been exposed to fine art as a young child, “except for Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington in every classroom,” the curiosity sparked by his encounter with the painting led Schatz to the university’s art department. “I looked into a room and saw students painting and decided that is what I wanted to do,” he said. “I immediately changed my major. I now had a goal and possession of myself. I now knew what I wanted to do and for the first time in my life I would make my own decisions.”

 

He finished his Bachelor of Arts in painting degree in 1966 and was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts degree program at Florida State. It was a very satisfying experience for the artist who now delved completely into his art. He was free to paint as he pleased, spending most of his time creating head studies from the live model.

 

Summer vacations during the artist’s graduate studies often provided opportunities for further exploration. On one occasion, he traveled to Washington, DC where he found work as a guard at the National Gallery of Art. During the mornings he would visit the National Gallery, setting up a drawing easel to copy paintings, then in the afternoon he would return to work as a guard.

 

After completing graduate school in 1968, Schatz spent a short time in New York City at the New York Studio School, studying drawing and painting. He returned to Tallahassee for the next ten years, painting on his own. He continued drawing and painting from live models as well as painting landscapes outdoors. He set up a studio in his living room and supported himself by working as a carpenter, bartender, house painter, waiter, janitor and locksmith – doing whatever he could do to earn enough money to continue pursuing his art.

 

Working directly from life using oil paint, Schatz focused on developing his technique of building up numerous layers in his paintings - a “piling on and taking off” of paint until he would get the result he wanted. This would often require several sessions with the model although sometimes a single session would result in a work worth saving. Inherent in these efforts was the struggle with drawing.

 

So in 1978 Schatz returned to New York City on a scholarship to study human anatomy and figure drawing with Robert Beverly Hale at the Art Students League. Hale was an important figure in the New York art world as a prior curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also a very influential and inspiring teacher/author who specialized in presenting the Western European traditional methods of representational drawing to many American artists.

 

Schatz remained in New York, working at various jobs to continue supporting his studies. It was an era when artists could afford to live in the city by working only a few days a week. A local patron of the arts generously offered Schatz a place to live as well as access to a studio in Chinatown where he could work during the week. Thus, the artist spent mornings drawing at the Art Students League, afternoons in the Chinatown studio and worked at various jobs on the weekends. His time in New York allowed him to further his studies of representational drawing, painting and sculpture from the human figure. He was always visiting museums, very much influenced by the individual spirit and formal mastery of many past and modern masters such as Rembrandt, Titian Goya, Cezanne, Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Most of the artists he felt drawn to were those who dealt with the human condition. It was during his first one-man show in a gallery in the East Village where Schatz met and befriended a couple who later invited him to visit them in Paris, France. In 1985 the artist spent eleven months in Paris while continuing his extensive figure studies at numerous museums and academies such as the Louvre and L’École des Beaux-Arts, where artists at the time could draw from the model for free.

 

It was a lifestyle that suited the artist, who was single and needed the freedom to travel and create. Traveling to major museums and experiencing paintings in person was essential to the artist’s development. From his home base in Paris, Schatz spent weekends in London, Amsterdam, Brussels and Antwerp, exploring the paintings of the world’s masters and searching for answers to some of the formal problems he was dealing with in his own work. Above all was the realization and appreciation that the human image is subject to each artist’s individual interpretation.

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This realization gave him the freedom to embrace his own stylistic eccentricites and shortcomings. The self-doubt and inadequacies experienced when comparing himself to his great mentors from the past gradually helped to foster a confidence and self-acceptance that is essential to artistic growth.

 

Schatz returned to Albany, Georgia following his art studies and travels throughout Europe. Now in his forties, he discovered a more satisfying way to earn a living while working on his art. He began teaching art at Westover High School in 1986 and then was offered a teaching position in 1988 at Albany State University. Here he taught multiple studio and art history classes. “I got paid to talk about the things I loved,” he said. He retired in 2003 as an associate professor and coordinator of the art department.

 

In 1991, Schatz received a Summer Seminar for College Teachers Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he joined eleven other grant recipients for five weeks in New York City to study prints and drawings. 

 

Throughout his secondary career as an educator, Schatz continued to draw and paint from the live model. The models at the time were his students, friends and the unemployed or homeless who would gather across the street from his studio. Regardless of his relationship to the model, his subject matter was always the mystery and drama of each human presence.

 

As his body of work grew, he began exhibiting in solo shows in museums and galleries throughout the South and was awarded numerous individual artist grants. A Schatz painting can often be challenging to the viewer because it does not flatter the sitter in the normal tradition. During one of his exhibitions in an outdoor show in Florida, a 10-year-old child came into the artist’s booth, clearly intrigued by the work. “He was really looking at the paintings,” Schatz said. “Then his mom came by and he said, ‘Hey Mom, look! Real people!’ His mom looked around and said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’ The work made her uncomfortable.”

 

Schatz retired from Albany State University in 2003 and once again packed his bags - this time moving to Florida. Two years later, he became an adjunct online instructor of art appreciation and art history with the St. Petersburg College of Florida and later returned to the classroom to teach drawing. 

 

In addition to painting and drawing Schatz began working with clay, continuing his exploration of the human figure. While many of his paintings are titled using proper names like “Christina” or “Paula” and suggest a reference to a specific person, the question of identity is more broad in the artist’s sculptural works.

 

The sculptures are created from memory, with no reference to a particular model. “The question of identity is a broad one,” said Schatz. “Who are these postures, poses and faces? These were questions I never asked while painting or drawing from the live model. In the past I dealt mostly with external appearance and now with sculpture I am discovering the power of imagination.”

 

Schatz is now enjoying life as a “snowbird” with his partner and fellow artist, Joan Duff-Bohrer, spending summers in rural upstate New York and winters in Florida. He continues to return to the Art Students League in New York City one month every summer to draw from the model. At age 77, Schatz feels his concepts of drawing and painting are expanding to create more complex and emotionally engaging compositions. “It’s exciting but that’s what you have to do to keep growing as a life-long student of drawing and painting.”