NEW YORK, NY.- Shamnoski Gallery is presenting Jon Schueler: Moods and Memories an exhibition organized in conjunction with a special screening of the documentary Woman in the Sky, directed by Max Woertendyke. Recently shown at international film festivals and not yet released to the public, the film anchors a focused presentation of paintings that illuminate Jon Schueler’s, (1G16 – 1G22), lifelong engagement with memory, mood, and the sky, while offering an intimate portrait of Magda Salvesen, Schueler’s widow and the steward of his legacy.
Woman in the Sky examines the often unseen labor of devotion, remembrance, and preservation that follows an artist’s death. Through Salvesen’s story, the film reflects on love, time, and the responsibility of carrying another life’s work forward—themes that resonate deeply with Schueler’s own artistic philosophy.
At the heart of the exhibition is a selection of paintings dedicated to Salvesen, works that register her presence not only as guardian of Schueler’s estate but as a profound emotional force within his life and art. In these canvases, devotion and remembrance are absorbed into Schueler’s atmospheric language, where weather and light function as metaphors for inner experience.
These dedications are complemented by paintings whose titles invoke “mood,” “memory,” and the act of recalling place—such as Memory of Mallaig—terms that are central to Schueler’s understanding of painting. For Schueler, the sky was not a motif but a totalizing concept of nature: a living field in which past experience, emotional states, and perception converged. His paintings do not describe landscape so much as reconstruct it from memory while translating fleeting inner states into painted atmosphere.
From “The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life” by Jon Schueler, p. 128: “When I look at the sky, I register the nuances of its mood, but I know that it holds meaning behind meaning behind meaning behind meaning.”
Schueler’s preoccupation with memory and mood was shaped by formative experiences, including his service as a B-17 navigator during World War II and his later discovery of the Scottish Highlands near Mallaig and the Sound of Sleat. Under the ever-changing northern sky, he found a visual language capable of expressing instability, longing, and transcendence.
By bringing together film and painting, Jon Schueler: Moods and Memories positions the gallery as a space where biography and atmosphere converge. The documentary frames Schueler’s legacy through Salvesen’s voice, while the surrounding paintings extend that narrative visually, offering an immersive meditation on love, memory, and the passage of time.
From Matthew Shamnoski, founder of Shamnoski Gallery:“Schueler understood the sky as a living field—one capable of holding memory, love, fear, and stillness all at once. The gallery’s mission is to create space for that depth of experience, where historical works of art can be encountered not just as objects, but experienced as carriers of lived meaning. Bringing these paintings into dialogue with Max Woertendyke’s documentary, Woman in the Sky, underlines how deeply personal Schueler’s work is, and how inseparable it is from the relationships that sustained it. We’re excited to collaborate with the film to present Schueler in a new context—one that connects painting, biography, and the ongoing work of legacy.”
