BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP
Staff Writer
Roosevelt ROOSEVELT — To see Robert E. Mueller’s schemas is to get a glimpse into what the mind that creates snowflakes must be like.
Mueller, a Roosevelt resident and artist who is widely known for his woodcuts that are charged with social commentary, has a lesser known artistic endeavor that he has dedicated over 50 years of his life to.
His line and dot drawings currently hanging in The Eleanor Gallery are called schemas. They are the result of a lifelong quest and a compilation of ideas he started pondering in the 1950s when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At that time he was studying higher mathematics, but he also took a class in the art department with Gyorgy Kepes. Kepes taught him about the bauhaus movement, which prided itself on minimalism. The homes in Mueller’s hometown of Roosevelt are actually fashioned after the bauhaus style.
Mueller also happened upon a little known piece by Picasso comprised of lines and dots that influenced his decision in trying to create an art form inspired by minimalism and mathematics. The new form would rely mostly on lines and dots assembled on a page using parallelisms and repetitions. He decided to try to refrain from using shapes except for an occasional circle or parabola.
One of the schemas Robert E. Mueller, of Roosevelt, recently created entails more color and swirls than his earlier work in the art form he created. The experiment resulted in his first drawings, which were created from fine tip pens and are mostly black and white. He decided to call the images schemas because they reminded him of the amateur radio schematic diagrams he used in making radios as a boy in the 20s.
Time played an important part in the evolution of the schemas, according to Mueller. After over 50 years they have evolved from the black dots and lines that sometimes look like topographical maps or the plottings of celestial bodies into imagery bursting with color that could look like anything from a design on a dress in one of Gustav Klimt’s paintings to what a blind person might see music like in his mind.
One of the schemas Robert E. Mueller, of Roosevelt, created early on shows dots, which he no longer uses in the art form he created in the 1950s. Mueller has incorporated color into the schemas with colored pencils, pastels and paintbrushes charged with numerous watercolors. Evolution has determined the dots he started out with as unnecessary at this moment in time.
Although he uses a chronological sequence in the production of the schema parts, Mueller is open to utilizing an ink spot that leaks out onto the page or any other number of mishaps.
Once he leeches onto a certain design element that he likes, it may very well influence the next hundred schemas he works on. However, while looking through the thousands he has drawn over the years, he is quick to say that things are true that he may
have forgotten and that he could pick up a relic and apply it again.
Through the years, Mueller said he has broken most of his original axioms of schema production one by one.
“Whenever I reach a dead end, I know I must push harder, push my imagination more, explore the inner awareness of artistic form, go deeper into complexity or pare away lines for greater simplicity,” he said.
The act of destruction is also important in creation, according to Mueller.
“Sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it and to try again to find something new,” he said
Whereas the initial schemas seemed to be derived from his experiences at MIT, later schemas look more musical but are not influenced by music, he said.
Mueller said the work is sui generis, which is Latin for of itself.
“The schemas are derived from nothing but themselves,” he said.
The most inspiration for each piece comes from the moment he is creating them, he said.
“I’m inspired by them — the schemas are a thing unto themselves,” he said.
Whereas the realists created art based on nature, the expressionists based their art on expressive feelings, the surrealists based their creations on unconscious feeling, and the abstract expressionists made abstract expressions of unconscious feelings, Mueller said he could best describe the schemas as something he derived out of his unconscious and the abstract elements of math.
“Math can be applied to nature, but nature does not come from math,” he said. “The schemas are not based on anything in nature other than themselves.”
Mueller said there aren’t many people in the world who know that his art form exists. Although the art culture hasn’t taken a shine to his endeavor, a couple of mathematical journals have published articles about his schemas.
“I’ve never had a show of it until this one in Roosevelt,” he said.
When asked what it feels like to have the work on display after all these years, Mueller said, “It feels very good. To get things out like that and to have people oohing and ahhing is quite fascinating, I think.”
The Eleanor Gallery, which has been displaying Mueller’s schemas all month, will have its last showing of the work Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. The gallery is located in the factory on Oscar Drive.