Ursula Schneider

Born in Switzerland

Attended Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and Keramischefachschule in Bern; holds Undergraduate Degree in Ceramics from Switzerland.

In 1968 she moved to the United States and Graduated in 1972 with an MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Lived and worked in New York from 1980-2004 and is now in Rockland County.

Taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Cooper Union. Currently teaches painting at Sarah Lawrence College.

Her artworks include pastel drawings, paintings, small-scale sculptural paintings and woodcuts, working on one medium at a time. These processes complement and enrich each other by stimulating a fresh approach and allowing for experimentation. Drawing from observation in the landscape has been the basis for the work. The focus is on seeing the inherent qualities of the observed and to find the appropriate translation for the medium used.

Represented in the collection of the UC Berkley Art Museum, Di Rosa Preserve in CA, U.S. Department of State, Auditorium Netzwerk, Germany, The Union Bank of Switzerland, UBS Security, Bell Savings Art Plus, Security Pacific Bank, CA, Swiss Bank Corporation.

“Painter Ursula Schneider has made a career out of rendering the quotidian extraordinary, and in “The River”, her latest series of nocturnal waterscapes, she continues to apply  a virtuoso technique to her surroundings, this time in upstate New York.  Working from photographs, Schneider paints the lights of a nuclear power plant reflecting on the Hudson River.  She blends a faux-naif style of representation with a loose, bio/geo kind of abstraction for an effect that falls just short of holographic.

This she achieves by mixing acrylic pigment with water-based urethane which she applies to sheets of nylon that are laminated in solid yet flexible surfaces. Like nylon stockings, her paintings have a sheer quality highlighted by shimmering moiré patterns that contrast with the paintings’ more opaque portions – places where the artist has applied thicker pigment directly on top of the mesh to delineate points of light, their reflections and the horizontal lines of the riverbank.  These elements more or less frame each picture.

In most of the larger works we see only the beaming lights and their reflections across the water, not the monolithic structure from which they emanate. The results are irregular grids composed of multi-colored lines whose rhythms deviate at odd, unpredictable intervals, like minimalist musical compositions. From a distance the grid predominates; but up close, those quivering  lines take precedence, and the associations they call forth include inverted exclamation points, minarets and popsicles.

There is an obsessive, slightly haunting quality to Schneider’s symbolist-tinged work that is close in spirit to the naturalistic, visionary paintings of Peter Doig. Like Doig, Schneider induces a heightened state of awareness that can only be achieved through an acute sensitivity to one’s surroundings.  But what Doig does with frenzied surface activity, Schneider achieves with reflections – double images that simultaneously appear right side up and upside down.  They activate our neural impulse to separate the actual from the ephemeral. Schneider may not be the first artist to be mesmerized by the play of light on water - Albert Pinkham Ryder did it most famously – but she is among the few who, in addition to Ryder, have figured out a way to animate it without relying on conventional illusionist techniques.

However significant her material inventions, it’s the cool sense of remove, the sense you get of watching yourself watch something else, that makes Schneider ’s painting compelling.  As the artist once wrote about a body of work based on images recorded in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, “It’s like an animal observing you, but you have not seen it yet.”

SquareCylinder.com, 29 July 2009 – David M. Roth

Hanga Woodcuts

Each edition is printed in my studio on Japanese handmade paper. The editions range from ten to thirty.

I began making woodcuts in 1988 using traditional oil inks. I was inspired by Ansei Uchimas’s Hanga woodcuts, in particular his luminous colors and their transparency.

Hanga is a Japanese woodcut print technique. The final print is the result of printing several carved blocks, some containing multiple areas of color.

The colors are water-based paints brushed on to the block. Damp paper is laid on the block and hand-rubbed with a baren. Barens are round, flat disks made of wood, plant fibers, plastic or metal. These are used to create different printing effects.

Hudson River Paintings

The paintings are painted with pure pigments and urethane on panels made of nylon and urethane. In 1997 Ursula Schneider began to experiment. She developed a technique for making her painting supports. She produced panels that were strong, flexible, absorbent as well as translucent. The panels are made of four layers of sheer nylon fabric. These are laminated with urethane, a high-grade acrylic binder. She has been painting on these panels since 1998 and is currently working on large-scale paintings of four by eight feet. The paintings can be rolled for storage and they can be transported in tubes.

Installation:The paintings of long and narrow formats are stretched between two wall mounted metal brackets. The large-scale paintings are mounted with Velcro.

This method and product is unique.

Contact us to inquire about purchasing artworks; please include the title and artist's name.