“Drawing. It all begins with drawing.”

Anne Scheid’s statement is key. Drawing is where art programs begin. It is the ‘given,’ the foundation for everything else. This may be obvious for painting, but it is true for sculpture, multimedia installation, performance and all of the electronic arts as well.

And then there is something about putting pen to paper. It is the way the creative process begins in so many disciplines, including the works of composers, architects, engineers or mathematicians. It is the "once upon a time", the beginning of the story and the creative process. Drawing is the artist’s initial method for noting ideas. It then becomes the process and research methodology; it facilitates development toward the final realization—which is often a painting. Anne Scheid, however, lets the drawing suffice: it becomes the self-sufficient image.

If a mental concept is the origin of art, the drawing is its first visual manifestation. Drawings range from the rawest ideas to expressively complete imagery, usually complex, layered with meaning and, occasionally, conclusive. Drawings are beloved for an immediacy and purity that is sometimes lost in the finished painting. The drawing had traditionally been considered the etude.
Scholar’s, however, pour over drawings by the masters for clues to development and meaning, the revelation of process and the artist’s ideas in nascent form; they scrutinize drawings for editing, additions and erasures, all of which are telling. Drawings are primarily source material. Connoisseurs often prefer the preparatory drawing to the finished painting because of freshness, evidence of the ‘hand’ of the artist and pure elan.

“My drawings are concerned with ‘the things of the spirit’”

Scheid defines drawing as imagery “where you can see the marks made by the artist.” She has always preferred drawing and has made a commitment to it. She remembers ”as a tot happily drawing on things.” Each drawing appears fresh but, of course, is the culmination of years of study, teaching and hard labor. The result manifests expertise that has been hard-won. It is based on a well-developed concept, and it provokes thought. And Scheid’s avowed interest is in presenting mysteries, not conclusions.

When Scheid was in college, the art program required a choice between pursuing drawing or painting. She chose drawing, a difficult choice considering the profession and its expectations. She confesses a passion for drawing, noting that she has been tempted in various directions but keeps postponing these options—in order to do more drawings. The market, however, has a well-known prejudice in favor of paintings. Often considered preparatory to paintings, drawings have a much more erratic history as marketable products.

Anne Scheid’s current work is the culmination of years of developing ideas and imagery, developing her unique methods in the practice of drawing. In a triad of large drawings, each is dominated by one of the three primary colors. These are separate entities, albeit related by size, technique and figuration. In predominantly blue field of Devotional Figures, she has paired figures on either side of a tree. Inevitably, this format recalls Adam and Eve, so ubiquitous a motif for almost two millenia. These two are female, however, and closely interlocked with the tree, even sharing contours. Instead of the traditional male/female contrast Scheid presents another: one figure is robust, fleshy, actively twisting and gesturing. The other is slender, reticent and contemplative, seemly focused on the other. The faces are mask-like and generic, revealing nothing. There is an austerity in their spare outlines, shorn heads, nudity and delicately suggested facial figures. In Scheid’s work, such austerity in the human imagery is always presented in the context of lush surfaces, emphatically worked with pastels, cloths, erasers and her own hands. The figures seem transparent and provisional. They could vanish into the blue pastel ground.

In Subconscious, Scheid has juxtaposed yellow and black fields, and included a crouching figure delicately limned against the lower half. To human perception, any horizontal division suggests ‘horizon’ and by inference, ‘landscape’. This assumption is somehow too instinctive to resist. With eons of conditioning, the human eye seeks ground lines and finds them. Here the implication of ‘landscape’ is reinforced by the yellow above being consistent with a luminous sky while the dark lower half is consistent with earth and its shadows.

The lone figure twists, and the arms reach in enigmatic gestures. Scheid focuses on the mysterious. She has always been fascinated by both the small puzzles and the large mysteries of life. She has written about what they mean to her. Her past exhibits have carried the titles, A Step In The Dark and Threshold of the Visible.

Transfiguration presents an intriguing image in which several figures share parts, are superimposed, merge, separate, reach up or down, advance and recede. While strong blues often suggest the night sky and yellow suggest the midday sun, red produces a mysterious realm, provocative but not given to easy interpretation. Scheid helps us here, noting that the shadowy figure in a black robe represents her Catholic upbringing and the discounting of the body. The figure is wrapped, restricted in movement with hands clenched and held tightly against the body. A tiny head represents the diminished scale of distance, the past which, Scheid notes, is receding in significance. The nude figure is fully revealed with arms stretched upwards, suggesting a blatant physicality, a full awareness of life and its energy. A telling detail here is the figure’s leg in the lower right corner which is accomplished so simply by a single line but sums up so much: flesh, muscle, bone, a shifting motion and even the strength of the leg. As in all Scheid’s work, the drawing process is compellingly clear.

All of this is set against a vigorously textured surface. Scheid chooses her papers with great care. For the larger works, Scheid has used a fairly heavy paper with a soft surface, a paper with a high capacity for holding pigment. She can apply more layers and does so until the paper is saturated. “I max it out, applying pastels until it won’t accept any more.” For the slightly smaller scale of the diptych, she used a paper with a harder surface which doesn’t accept as much pigment but allows for sharper detail.

Scheid’s Diptych is based on two fields saturated with red pastel, dense and overwhelming. It is much like a physical substance taking over the surface. Ambiguous shapes in black and white float within a sea of red. Whites are not used as highlights; blacks are not used as shadows. Blacks and whites play over the surface in diffuse veils, as well as amorphous shapes or even more discrete forms suggesting a fallen leaf and rose petals. On the far right is a human figure, defined by delicate shading and subtle contours.

As abstract artists have noted, it is difficult to compete with the human figure, however elusive it may be. Despite the sheer amount and intensity of red in this diptych, despite the pronounced facture, despite the elusive quality of the figure on the other hand and the fact that it seems to move away, the figure is unequivocally a focal point. The figure is complete, is in motion, mid-gesture in fact, and yet the figure is almost not there.

Evolved through years of work, Scheid’s figures are distinctively hers. Gestures are never obvious or easily understood; they are certainly expressive but never definitive. Faces are generalized and often mask-like. Figures are generic, cannot be identified and remain unknown. The motion of bodies is slight. Figures step, turn, stretch. Scheid draws human anatomy from years of experience and teaching, rendering the routine motions of the body with easy familiarity. Yet the bodies are minimal in definition; the essence is there and nothing more. Motion is indicated, but the purpose is unclear. Hands reach out but not for objects. Gestures are articulate but free of rhetoric.

Scheid’s drawings are haunting. This is partly due to the austerity of the human imagery and the puzzles she presents. The figures are a matter of contours, shadows or hinted outlines. They are generic and remote. They are however embedded in lush, intensely colored surfaces Scheid’s use of media—choice of papers, thickly applied pastel surfaces, strong colors—is truly luxuriant. And emphatically physical. The human body in contrast remains ephemeral, a uniquely mysterious reference, embedded in fields of color.

Maren Henderson, Ph.D.
Professor, Art History
Cal Poly Pomona

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Opening Catalog Essay
Origins: Drawings of the Body
By Maren Henderson, Ph.D.
Fresno Art Museum
February 1999