PETER SCHUYFF

Schuyff was born in 1958 in Baam, Holland. In 1967 he moved with his family to Vancouver, Canada, where his father was a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University. His mother is an artist. Growing up amid the radicalism of the late '60s and early '70s, Schuyff was intrigued by his father's "hippie" colleagues. He also became infatuated with a number of art-world personalities, video artists, Andy Warhol, the New York School painters, especially Willem de Kooning. "I was very impressed that they could get away with doing such naughty work," he says. "It seemed so rich, so seductive, so profound."

Inspired by both the irreverence and the talent of these people, Schuyff decided after high school to enroll at the Vancouver School of Art. He studied there for a year and a half but found his fellow students, many of whom were performance artists, far more stimulating than his classes. After leaving school, he painted for a while in Vancouver and became friends with a Canadian painter, Michael Morris, who "taught me everything I know." Inevitably, Schuyff was drawn to New York.

In 1981 he settled in the East Village. It's hard to imagine a painter of such elegant canvases having roots in that scruffy environment. Early in his career, Schuyff did traditional work while being inspired by nontraditional art. Now, he says, he's going the other way: "I start off a painting very simply with an idea of the structure, and from that a kind of obsessiveness develops that renders spirituality almost inevitable, and the work takes on a life of its own. But Schuyff lived and showed his work there, experiencing what he calls the "archetypal artist's first years and living in so small a space that I had to roll up my canvases to make them fit." Now, nineteen years later, Schuyff's biomorphic forms and vibrantly colored, light-filled grids and template patterns have firmly established his reputation.

Schuyff's favorite terms to describe himself are "irreverent," "obsessive, " and "spiritual. " By irreverence, he means his confidence in what he is doing, his casual acceptance of an abstract vocabulary. The obsessiveness is in his technique. And through this process, his work becomes imbued with a kind of spirituality an apparition seems to build up within the layers of paint, and the light emanating from the canvas is, perhaps, a hint of its presence. .

The paintings at Schuyff's first New York show, in 1982, were filled with lively biomorphic forms. Two years later, he began painting one patterned surface over another, and then began to add semi translucent white grids to the two layers, further confusing the relationship between the patterns. Slightly claustrophobic, these paintings have been described as padded cells, albeit ones through which light mysteriously penetrates.

When making a painting, Schuyff usually begins by using a previous work as inspiration. He applies layers and layers of translucent paint--often as many as fifty to each canvas. It's a laborious technique, but "I feel increasingly gratified as the process continues and ultimately gratified when it is finished," Schuyff says, though he admits to other emotions as well, including anxiety, never certain what the outcome will be. This arduous layering enables him to represent a luminous quality of light. "There are at least a dozen different ways to represent light or darkness, and I use them all," he says. "The picture finally develops a patina that describes a kind of spiritual sensation."

Each canvas takes three to four weeks to finish, and half the time Schuyff is not satisfied with the product and has to start over again. When that happens, he paints over the original canvas, and in so doing, strengthens the patina. "The visceral qualities become stronger if there are some ghosts underneath," he says.