For Jon Schueler, the sky was a conveyor of all things from life and death to love and fear. His skyscapes exist on the border between figuration and abstraction, being at once wholly recognisable as the skies above the Sound of Sleat, yet at the same time expressing an emotional and psychological gravity. This careful balance gave him a unique position within the Abstract Expressionist milieu with which he was so closely associated.

Schueler’s intense focus on the sky began as a boy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was born in 1916 and developed during the Second World War when he was a navigator in the US Army Air Force. In the war he witnessed the skies over Europe desecrated by fire and smoke as well as the beauty of the mountains, land and horizon as seen from the sky. Schueler was haunted by what he saw and was discharged in 1944 on medical grounds, suffering what would now be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1949 he enrolled as a full-time student, studying under Clyfford Still and Robert Diebenkorn. Encouraged by Still, Schueler moved to New York in 1951 where he became immersed in the world of the Abstract Expressionists and socialised with artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. In 1957 and 1959 he had solo shows in Leo Castelli’s gallery, a dealer then known for his representation of the Abstract Expressionists.

In 1957 he visited Mallaig in Western Scotland for the first time where he would later buy an old schoolhouse called Romasaig in which he lived and worked 1970-75 and thereon revisited every year. His studio looked out over the narrow channel Sound of Sleat which separates the Isle of Skye, the Mainland and smaller islands such as Rhum, Eigg and Muck. It was the expressive skies over this landscape that fascinated the artist, even when he was back in Manhattan. In order adequately render the ephemeral beauty he witnessed, Schueler studied the work of J.M.W. Turner in London, 1958. He integrated Turner’s techniques of layering coloured glazes and anchoring his compositions with the mere suggestion of a horizon or cloud.

Schueler described his painting as the “rending of a veil,” an attempt to reveal fundamental human truths through meditation on his skyscapes. He described this search as a profound impulse to confront truths about life, whether that meant humanity, love, loneliness or eternity. Schueler desired that his search would ultimately break through figuration to grasp at a fundamental universality. This pursuit aligns him with Abstract Expressionism but he questioned the obstinacy with which other Abstract Expressionists embraced non‐objectivity as the prerequisite of freedom of thought and expression.

In a 1975 he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum and in the same year appeared in Landscapes, Interior and Exterior: Avery, Rothko and Schueler at the Cleveland Institute of Fine Arts. His work appears in various public collections including Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra) and Baltimore Museum of Art.