Ann Schaumburger

About

Since the early 1970s, Schaumburger has been preoccupied with the simple structure of the gable roofed house, a familiar visual shorthand for home and frequent subject of children’s drawings. Her recent paintings on wood panel borrow their compositions from the shapes of tin miners’ stone houses in Cornwall, England and prefabricated metal sheds in Amherst, Virginia. Breaking down the gabled house’s geometric planes into smaller triangles, squares, and rectangles, Schaumburger uses Flashe and Polycolor vinyl paint to fill these shapes with dazzling color.

Defined by self-imposed constraints, Schaumburger’s aesthetic vocabulary yields a surprisingly varied range of expression. She begins by selecting just four colors and placing them together in a grid. Methodically repeating this exercise, she determines the specific juxtapositions of color from which each painting will develop , isolating the planes of both house and landscape into individual contrasting gridded schemes. The grid shifts in scale and proportion from plane to plane and work to work.

Schaumburger’s process is intuitive, based not on theory but guided instead by what she sees before her as she works. The paintings included in this exhibition emerged from an unexpected mix of neutral earth tones of brown, red, purple, and green and luminous shades of yellow, blue, orange, and pink. The works’ repeated geometry and bold tonal contrasts together provide an illusion of movement, an unresolvable perceptual tension between foreground and background, house and landscape.