Aaron Schuerr | The Joy of Wild Places

Aaron Schuerr amplifies the natural world in color and light

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

This story was featured in the June 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“We each find our way, find our voice,” says Montana artist Aaron Schuerr, who has eagerly followed his own path toward art since his childhood. Though it was sometimes meandering or obscured, he trusted this path, and eventually it led the nature-loving boy from the Chicago suburbs to fully realize his dream in unspoiled, magnificent spaces spanning the natural world.

Schuerr remembers a day when he was 8 years old that a neighbor came to visit, perhaps to collaborate with Schuerr’s parents on a project for school. She had been tasked with designing the school’s mascot—a wildcat—and she was working on a drawing of the animal when young Aaron took notice. Astounded by her ability to so eloquently reproduce a living thing on the page, he quickly wanted to figure out how to do the same. So he secretly took one of the reference books full of animals she had brought with her and started drawing a mountain lion on a cliff. “I was mesmerized,” he says of this first encounter with art. “It was a great discovery. For an 8 year old, it fulfilled everything you want: it was interesting to do, and it got me attention. At that point, I thought, ‘I’m going to be an artist.’”

Schuerr stayed true to his early aspirations and followed his creative path from that point forward. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he focused on semiabstract art and performance pieces. At one point during his tenure there, he decided to travel to Scotland as an exchange student for one semester, and he became so enamored with the country and the school that he decided to stay.

He eventually earned his degree in fine arts in Scotland, but his time there proved to be a crucial step in his artistic journey for another reason: It was during a trip to the beach near St. Andrews when Schuerr had what he calls a “eureka moment” while sketching his first landscape. A fire lit up inside him, sparking a joy unlike any other he had experienced before. “I had never felt so elated by the creative process. It was like meeting myself for the first time,” he remembers.

From then on, Schuerr abandoned the more abstract works he had been pursuing and started drawing the landscape. He drew exclusively in charcoal at first, then gradually integrated pastels into his compositions after finding his mother’s old set buried in the attic. (She had taken one art class while pregnant with him and happened to save the pastels.) Over the course of his last year of college in Scotland, his work transformed from simple charcoal sketches into vibrantly pigmented pastel paintings. And since then, in terms of both subject matter and medium, he’s never looked back.

After graduation, Schuerr moved from his native Illinois to Montana, where he found mountainous, dramatic geography to inspire his art and fulfill his need to connect with the outdoors. He waited tables and held down various part-time jobs while continuing his fine-art practice. Eventually he placed his work in a gallery, and then one day in 2005, he quit his last side job and didn’t seek another one. Slowly, and without fanfare, he had become a full-time artist.

Today Schuerr lives in Livingston, MT, with his wife and their three sons. “I love being in a place where I can drive just three or four miles and have more things than I could ever paint,” he says of his home, which is located only an hour away from Yellowstone National Park; he served as artist-in-residence there last summer. In addition to creating his own work, Schuerr teaches several workshops a year and has produced a set of instructional DVDs as well. He has won numerous awards and is a signature member of the Pastel Society of America, the American Impressionist Society, and the West Coast Pastel Society.

Despite the fact that Schuerr lives and works among the wide-open spaces and mountains of Montana, he also seeks out oceanscapes, desert scenes, and other far-flung places for his artwork. He travels regularly to participate in plein-air events or simply to explore new geography. Most recently, he went on a monthlong trip to the California coast, Nevada, and Hawaii, during which he painted outside every day.

He also paints en plein air while working near his home, preferring the experience of being out in the open while he paints. And he maintains this practice all year round, setting up his equipment for single and multiday painting sessions. He even suits up during the winter, trekking through the Montana wilds to paint its brilliant, snowy landscape. In fact, he considers winter to be one of the most beautiful, meditative times to experience nature. But whatever the time of year, he likes to visit the same local sites over and over, to capture things he hasn’t seen before, pick up on their nuances, and really get to know the visual elements. Such familiarity, in turn, allows him to make a quicker, easier entrance into a new painting.

Schuerr determines his subject matter as he explores, paying attention to visually compelling shapes and contrasts within the landscape—a methodology harkening back to his early interest in abstract painting. Compositions materialize as he analyzes how the shapes fit together and play off one another, the way the light bounces around the objects, and how they move throughout the space.

Although he has been known predominantly for his pastel work over the course of his career, Schuerr now splits his time between pastels and oils. He likes having the flexibility to work effectively in both mediums, sometimes preferring the “beauty of touch” and “purity of pigment” that come with using pastels, and other times appreciating the fluidity and ability to mix subtle hues that oil affords.

Working in oil didn’t come easily or immediately for Schuerr, however. He started experimenting with it nearly 20 years ago, and only recently has he arrived at a place where the paint brings him true joy. “Something clicked,” he says of one recent on-location painting expedition, where he suddenly felt a creative release, free to paint with a more instinctual approach. Finding a healthy balance between analytical and what he terms “improvisational” painting is important for him as he evolves his craft and mines new methods of expression. Also helpful in this evolution is Schuerr’s writing; he has recently had opportunities to profile other artists, prompting him to evaluate his own techniques and practices from a more objective platform.

“Painting is the experience,” says Schuerr. He relishes the act of making contact with his canvas, of channeling the colors and light that surround him, of finding out what a painting or drawing will become as it grows from his head and hand. “For me, it’s more about enjoying the process,” he adds. The road to discovery is, undeniably, what fulfills him.

“I find a lot of joy and peace being in wild places,” says Schuerr, who has loved spending time in nature since his days at Boy Scout camp. His passion for the outdoors transcends activities like skiing, rock climbing, and backpacking, though, as it provides Schuerr an opportunity for solitude and true communion with the spiritual side of the unadulterated, wild places he visits. It is in these places he feels grounded and meditative, while also fully aware of nature’s vastness and his own smallness within the grand architecture of the universe.

So enlivened is Schuerr by making art outside that he often gets anxious when working in the studio. He feels called to return to nature, both to create and to interact with his surroundings. “It’s where I’m most fully present,” says the artist. Ultimately, working on location is what continually recharges his creative energy. It allows him to translate color and light directly from their sources, giving his work a sense of purity and freshness—a less diluted transformation from nature to canvas.

Nevertheless, plein-air painting is not simply a technical catalyst for Schuerr. “The best times in painting are when I’m working through the process of understanding what it is to be a fixed point in a world that’s moving around me,” he explains. Such an experience anchors the artist, giving him the means to more readily communicate his own sensory experience and emotional response.

Schuerr says, “My deep desire is to communicate my experience with a place.” To that end, he strives to share his joy in the wild places he visits, along with his concern for preserving them and appreciating their gifts. All this feeds into what he can impart to viewers through his art and what type of dialogue his work might inspire. “I start the story. It’s someone else’s job to finish it,” he says simply.

Interpreting the landscape in two dimensions is both Schuerr’s greatest creative challenge and greatest passion, and one he finds humbling as well: “It feels wondrous that I get to do this, that I get to indulge in trying to understand the landscape, and that people are moved by what I do.”

representation
Cad Yellow Fine Art Gallery, www.cadyellow.com; Montana Trails Gallery, Bozeman, MT; Legacy Gallery, Jackson, WY, and Scottsdale, AZ; The Mission Gallery, St. George, UT; Howard/Mandville Gallery, Kirkland, WA.

This story was featured in the June 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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