Fallen Logs and Failing Limbs

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Ward Schell, "Forest Bridge," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 24" x 60"

For as long as he’s been an artist, Ward Schell has painted outdoor scenes. He looks down to the ground, ignoring the prairie landscape tradition of big skies and distant horizons, often immersing himself in the tangled undergrowth, rotting stumps and mossy rocks of the forest floor.

Over some three decades, with uncommon dedication to this singular approach, he has painted with decisive representation. It’s not quite photorealism: his images are precise, certainly, with a careful rendering of texture and light, yet they eschew the sharp-edged exactitude of the camera lens.

Among the paintings in his show, Overgrowth, on view at the Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina until April 22, is Forest Bridge, which juxtaposes the base of a massive tree and a smaller fallen log, both mottled with lichens. Does the painting show a dead stump or a tree that still holds life? The image is ambiguous on that point, even as leafy sprigs catch the light in the mossy foreground, another reminder of the cycle of life.

Schell painted this work at his Moose Jaw home based on sketches and photographs he took in the woods north of Prince Albert on Emma Lake’s Fairy Island, a place where one of his favourite painters, the late Ernest Lindner, lived and worked. Lindner’s studio, a simple spruce-log cabin, is now a provincial heritage site. Forest Bridge pays homage to Lindner, an artist who also found inspiration in the woods.

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Ward Schell, self portrait

Like all of Schell’s forest paintings, it has what he calls “an edge of darkness.” He talks of the fear, or perhaps it’s the respect, a prairie boy feels in the confined space of a forest – a sentiment that becomes even more poignant when he mentions that he has lost much of the strength and sensation in his left arm – the one he uses to paint – due to multiple sclerosis.

The disease destroys the insulating covers of nerves in the brain and spinal cord, causing a debilitating range of symptoms, that can include muscle weakness, poor coordination and blindness. There is no cure. Schell, 58, was diagnosed in 1995, and managed well for many years. But life has changed in the three years since his last show. He and his wife, Jennifer McRorie, the curatorial director at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, have a young daughter. And his disease has taken a turn for the worse.

“MS is a monster,” says Schell. “It can take it out of you because you really don’t know when it’s coming or how bad it’s going to be. It doesn’t give any warning. So you have to beat it, one way or another.”

He recalls some sage advice: “You either go down and wallow and feel bad and hate the world. Or you just embrace it and carry on. So that’s what I’m doing here. It’s not easy. I get frustrated at the minor things. Kneeling down to play with my daughter and trying to get back up again, that’s a lot of work. Putting on socks is a lot of work. You get angry that you can’t do what you used to do.”

As his arm grew weaker, Schell put his ingenuity to work and started to plan how to forestall what he fears losing most – the ability to paint. He took inspiration from the American photorealist Chuck Close, who created special studio aids so he could continue to paint after he was paralyzed when a spinal artery collapsed.

Schell can move his left wrist, but has a poor grip. So when he paints, he wears a brace designed for people with carpal tunnel syndrome. He holds his brush in place by inserting it through a hole in the brace. “I don’t drop my brush,” he says. “It’s always in there.”

A nylon cord is tied to the brace, and the cord runs up to a pulley suspended from a shower rod bolted above his easel. This allows him to direct his hand from left to right across the canvas, as well as up and down, simply by pulling the cord with his right hand. “I’m like my own puppeteer,” he says.

For Schell, painting is like breathing. He has to do it. With this system, he can spend six to eight hours, or sometimes even as long as 14 hours, at his easel.

Interestingly, McRorie suggests her husband is more interested in mark-making than in painting. “Ward actually kind of draws with his paint,” she says. At the opening reception for Overgrowth the night before, she noticed again how his realism unravels the nearer one gets. “Up close, it deconstructs and becomes, in a way, more abstract,” she says. She also noticed how people were drawn to Schell’s use of vibrant colour. He sometimes has trouble now gauging its intensity, and overshoots. Like Schell, she feels the latest work is not as tight as it used to be. “I think he’s had to become a little looser, but it’s not in any detrimental way,” says McRorie. “It’s almost like his paint handling has become more mature by having to loosen up a little bit.”

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Ward Schell, "Undercover," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 48" x 36"

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Ward Schell, "Forest Fur," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40"

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Ward Schell, "Warm Embrace," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40"

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Ward Schell, "Moss and Lichen," 2017

acrylic on canvas, 38" x 38"

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Schell isn’t sure why he is so fascinated by the forest floor. He describes moving from Regina to Vancouver when he was 15 to live with his dad after his parents split up, and hiking in the lush coastal rainforest. The West Coast still interests him. His 2017 painting, Undercover, shows a decaying nurse log amid a bed of ferns, a scene he spotted in Vancouver's Stanley Park. As the tree rots, it adds nutrients to the soil, encouraging a new generation of seedlings to root along its length.

After high school, Schell attended classes at the Vancouver School of Art for two years and travelled in Europe. He returned to Saskatchewan in 1980 and took art classes at the University of Regina, although he never completed a degree. At times, he has managed to support himself painting. At others, not so much. His day jobs have included painting dioramas for museums and drawing editorial cartoons. He works now as a preparator for the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

In times of drought, trees will sometimes spontaneously drop a limb, sacrificing a part to save the whole. It’s a horrifying notion to a human, with so many fewer limbs, each so precious, any loss profound. Perhaps that’s why the downed trees in Schell’s paintings carry such elegiac resonance with his own failing arm. Like trees, humans have their own horizons, some near, some far. It’s the things we love, our families, perhaps, or our art, that allow us to escape, for a time, the reality of impending darkness. 

For many people, it would be a claustrophobic nightmare to stare for hours at a patch of tangled bush while dabbing paint, over and over, onto a taut piece of cloth. Not so for Schell, who says he’ll paint as long as he can, even if he has to clench the brush in his teeth. “When I’m in my studio,” he says, “wow, it’s like I’m flying.”