Article: Charles Schridde: Impressions of the West

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By Victor Forbes - Spring 2001 Fine Art Magazine

To me, Charles Schridde personifies everything that is big. Everything that is big about this country, everything that is big about this life. Whether it is the vast blueness of the sky or the most minute hair on a wild bull's nose, Schridde imbues into his paintings great size, energy and motion. It could be the commotion of a dangerous ride, the poetic motion of a horse, a rider and a dog, or the majestic stillness of a great Indian chieftain. In Charles Schridde's work, a larger-than-life representation of reality without any trace of exaggeration is the norm. As if the softness of the infinite and the roughness of the immediate were not big enough subjects to ponder, Schridde brings in an art scholar's understanding of what came before him and a hired gun's bravado and confidence in his skill to give to his subject matter an elegance and honor so befitting the land, the people and the animals of an appealing frozen frame of Americana: the Wild, Wild West.

In so doing, Schridde touches upon another element of American culture, as deep-rooted in our society as a fast horse or a fast car: The American Dream. In his previous life in the world of advertising, Schridde, as much as anyone, did his part to foist that vision on us all. Just take a look at the illustrations and photographs on these pages: Mustangs, Deloreans, supercharged cars and trucks leaving the ground; Robert Redford, General Yaeger, the pilot who broke the sound barrier, sitting in a Corvette for a General Motors ad. Yes, Charlie pushed the good life on us, made us want to work hard for that prize. He did it himself, as well. Busting a gut on Detroit's version of Madison Avenue. Getting deathly ill in the process. Over time, Schridde ends up fine. He's living in a beautiful home not far from where the swallows of Capistrano come to roost every year and when the Professional Rodeo and Bull Riders need an image, they get Schridde to do the painting. For their big event in New York, at Madison Square Garden, it's Schridde and Leroy Neiman. Not bad company for a man whose consciousness toward art began to form looking through a knothole from a three seat outhouse in the farm country of Michigan during the Great Depression. He was barely three and it was as if an apple dropped out of the sky and clunked him on the head as he sat and pondered the view through that opening in the wood and how it changed perspective wise with each eye. His family at that time was living in a little town (population 1,600) complete with a village idiot and one man police force. They were going to make his father the first art teacher in the high school there but fatal illness struck and it never happened. Instead, Charlie kind of inherited the position when, while in the third grade, the administration was buying a work of art for the high school and for some reason took the neophyte along to help choose the painting. When he returned, he recalls going with his mother to the home relief station to pick up government food in his little red wagon. That's how Charlie Schridde lived when he was very young. Want to hear more? When his father was sick, the Schridde's moved into an old house made with square nails. He could tell because it was never painted. There was no electricity, just kerosene lamps and an old Eizen glass stove that you could see through. That's what heated the house. The stove would get so hot that when you came near, you'd have to jump away, but your back was cold as stone. They were a family living out of the past, and that they lived like the cowboys lived way back when was not lost on the boy. Schridde took it all in stride and came to view the difficulties and tragedies from a perspective not dissimilar to what one would find in a Hemingway novel, in stories that were always about life and death, about, as Schridde so aptly states, "some guy who lost his gonads or the short, happy life of Francis Macomber, who was trying to get up the nerve to shoot a lion but his wife was behind him and shot and killed him and no one was sure whether she did it on purpose or not." So it isn't that great a stretch to see in the mature Charlie Schridde great compositions about life and death because isn't that what bull riding and rodeo are about? Certainly that's what excites him. Will the guy make it or will he not. And that's what life's all about. We're all going to live, and die. "That Hemingway," said Schridde. "He kept you on the edge."

Schridde graduated and won a scholarship to art school. One of his first paintings, at age seventeen, Woman in Black Dress, is Pictured on the next page. It is an amazing portent of things to come. Literally hundreds of layers of glaze were put down over watercolor. Schridde did it English style, a technique he picked up from a textbook borrowed from the library. His goal was to make it slick, like a photograph. With watercolor, you put a glaze down and you have to come back with water on the edges so that you don't get a line. "Nowadays," says the artist, "People would think it was done with an airbrush, but the difference is in the detail." Schridde painted every eyebrow on her, just as he paints every hair on those bulls and horses today. "That," he says, "shows you how hard it is to be an artist."

That would be the understatement of the day. Yes, Schridde did get a scholarship to art school but shortly after graduating, the demand for illustrators began to disappear. In the 1950s, when he started, illustrations in black and white and two color were the primary source of income for an entire group of talented souls. An advertising agency would hire an artist and then that artist would hire other artist friends to do a painting of, for example, a pound of butter. The one who was hired to do that at first would get too busy and this became really big in the 20s and 30s with the introduction of many newspapers and magazines. They couldn't print color in that era and artists and art directors made their names and their fortunes by becoming specialists at painting a beautiful woman, beautiful bottle of beer, a beautiful car. People like James Montgomery Flag were paid big money to do something that looked great that would help sell the product. As time went on, and technology improved, color came into play. Schridde's illustration is an example of how the industry worked in those days. When he was at New Center Studio in Detroit, the agency just picked up Motorola, a new account that introduced a portable television that coincided with the basic printing processes of the day. The agency made a contest of it among their illustrators, who were all asked to submit their vision of a neat place to watch TV. Schridde "lucked out" and won with Man and Woman in Trees with TV. The image ran in the centerfold of LIFE and The Saturday Evening Post, the two top magazines of the day. He made such an impression that when he left the agency; they asked him to continue on with them as a free lancer.

It must be noted here, in the words of Constance Schwartz, Director and Chief Curator of the Nassau County Museum of Art, that "in art there seems to be a silent battle. It is an invisible battle that exists between art and illustration. It is often stated that illustration differs from art because it is inexorably tied to the subject matter and events or the descriptive literary page. This concept may be true, but paintings by West, Goya or Delacroix or portraits by Sargent, Whistler or Eakins, can hardly be considered illustrations." Schridde concurs. I think being an illustrator and being an artist are very similar. Many of the very famous artists were also illustrators. You ever heard of Winslow Homer? He illustrated the Civil War, that's what he started out with. Childe Hassam is the most famous Impressionist painter in this country and he was an illustrator. John Sloan, he was an illustrator. He started in The Ash Can School in New York under Robert Henri. All of the guys in that group basically came from Cincinnati or St. Louis, these six were all illustrators and they all became famous painters. Even Leroy Neimann started out illustrating; he is famous for his work in Playboy. Toulouse Lautrec was an illustrator. He did those posters for the Moulin Rouge."

Slowly, as technology allowed color into the magazines, Schridde was forced to move over to photography. In Detroit, the car business was good and when they started going to photography all his clients asked Schridde to take pictures. The switch to a camera from a paintbrush "went fine. It was so much easier and it's still easier. You can do ten photographs in one day and if you do a painting a week you're doing damn well."

Schridde didn't go to photography school; he just bought a camera and started shooting. It took him about a year and a half to get proficient, with all the art that he learned in his life composition and lighting working in his favor. He was now an artist with a camera and quite successful with some choice assignments (see the Robert Redford photo and caption, on page 36). This skill with a camera stayed with him and helps a lot in his rodeo work. Though he'd rather paint outside, from life, he really has to be a good photographer because no one can paint the action scenes that Schridde loves so much from an eight second bull ride. To get the intense realism of the action, Schridde crawls on the ground, bends way down, and pushes the equipment to its limit. "You can fake it, or do it from your mind, a lot of artists have done that, but all their paintings look alike, They paint every guy to look like the same guy, so after a while all your paintings look like the same picture?if you do the same thing over and over..."

Schridde left Detroit in 1993 after 40 years there, maybe more. From what some would call an artistic wasteland, Schridde moved to the endless sunshine and artistic snobbery of Laguna Beach, primarily because he was without the companionship of artists for so many years. He found many of them not convivial, kind of choosy. But after six or seven years, fortune smiled upon him when he met the woman who would become his wife at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in the Laguna Beach Museum. The portrait that appears on the dedication page of this book came about shortly after they met and he asked her to pose. "She had to sit still for an hour," said Charlie. "It came out well and she liked it. She liked it so much that she married me!"

In tracing the life and work of Charles Schridde, one cannot help but notice a very natural progression from the early technical prowess of youthful endeavors, to the more restricted illustrations up to and including the photographs and imagery for which Schridde was when he freelanced for major advertising agencies to the tumultuous energy of his latest paintings. His work heralded a style that was reflective of and clearly defined the supersonic era and had asmuch to do with fostering this "go-go-go" phenomenon intrinsic, for better or worse, to our national consciousness.

With the same impact with which he attacked the fastest cars of the day, Schridde goes for hearts of cowboys and cowgirls everywhere with his intense action paintings, which are amazingly tempered by his Ansel Adams-influenced landscapes. This dichotomy is further evident in much of Schridde's work in which elements of plein aire blend seamlessly with the most fervent brushstrokes of any action school alum, considering that action began with van Gogh and he is still the undisputed master. Schridde says he has a long way to go in exploring this milieu going so far to say that he has just scratched the surface. "I feel like the van Gogh Bull (on the cover of his recently published monograph) is probably the best thing I've done so far," he says. "I really want to do some more impressionistically. I think I've got the realistic styles, but I want to explore different ways of doing what I have been doing." With a genuine affection for his subject matter, there really is no limit to what Charles Schridde can bring to the world of Western Art - and that, dear reader, is no bull.

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