William Schneider, Radio City, oil, 30 x 40.
William Schneider has long considered himself primarily a figurative painter, as 80 percent of the paintings he creates portray the human form. But based on his honorable mention for RADIO CITY, following on the same recognition for MIDNIGHT ON CLARK in the 2018 Artistic Excellence competition, “Maybe I should paint more cityscapes,” he laughs.
This year’s winning scene was inspired by a “drizzly, misty autumn night” several years ago in Manhattan, where the artist had flown from Chicago to participate in an exhibit at the venerable Salmagundi Club. “I came across Radio City Music Hall and used iPhone photographs as the stepping-off place for an exercise in design,” he says. “I was intrigued by the interplay of warm and cool light shapes interlocking with the abstracted darks of surrounding buildings.” The result, he adds, “somehow evoked a feeling of isolation and melancholy, although it’s in the heart of the Big Apple.”
Combining his right-brain artistic sensibilities with a left-brain analytical approach, Schneider now enjoys applying to his work such theoretical thinking as the complex design ratios developed by Art Nouveau founder Alphonse Mucha and laws of aesthetics based on brain research by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. “When I was in art school at the American Academy [after successful careers in music and running his own pension consulting firm], instructors talked about ‘connecting the darks, connecting the lights.’ And that never made any sense to me then, but it really does now.” In the case of a cityscape, he adds, “Who knows if a car was actually where I put it? There’s so much more room for imagination.”
Find Schneider’s work at McBride Gallery, Annapolis, MD; New Masters Gallery, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA; Illume Gallery West, Philipsburg, MT; Reinert Fine Art, Charleston, SC; River’s End Gallery, Waukesha, WI; and www.schneiderart.com.
This story appeared in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.