HANS SCHIEBOLD, PAINTER

Oneonta Gorge via panomanio.com

Images Of Hans Schiebold Paintings.

Alert bloggers look for the diamond in the rough, people and places others’ have missed.

Mr. Schiebold is a diamond, but not rough. He’s more of a diamond in a setting fit for Liz Taylor, or Cartier.

His work reads like an excavation of natural history, memories hidden deep in the earth.

Canvases hanging in museums, corporate headquarters, and galleries around the world reveal natural events he makes his own.

My first viewing of a Schiebold was the man himself, also a work of art.

A lion-maned man hung from a pull-up bar. Nothing unusual about that.

Lot’s of people hang from pull-up bars in a 24 Hour Fitness Gym.

They stretch out before moving on to the rest of their workout.

But that’s not what happened.

I tried not to stare in disbelief watching the man knock-out twenty pull-ups.

Twenty? I felt a strain doing five on a bet with my kid and here’s a man closing on eighty years old. All I could think was, “What’s wrong with me?”

He would shame every high school gym class in America, and it was only his first set.

It was a stunning performance done on a regular basis. I had to know the trick. How does anyone any age do sets of twenty pull-ups and sets of fifty straight pushups?

Here’s a clue from Gallery 903:

Hans Schiebold was trained in the decorative wall arts and ceiling arts in former East Germany before immigrating to the United States at age 27, where he received his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Hartford, Connecticut.

After a career in teaching, Hans relocated to Portland, Oregon with the desire to paint full time. The following years saw a transformation in the style of his work, from abstract to more representational.

When you see someone push themselves as hard as Mr. Schiebold, you might expect an Olympian-sized response on a name search. And it was, just not the expected.

The Olympic moment was seeing his art. Calling it heroic isn’t enough.

Who would expect a man in better shape than Jack LaLanne, a man more fit to pump you up than Hans and Frans of SNL fame, a man unleashing enough creative vision to transform the land we live on?

From the Lanning Gallery:

Schiebold uses his own acrylic-based mixed media and unconventional tools: palette knives, spatulas, hand-shaped metal tools, sponges, nets, patterned rollers, almost anything that will create the pattern or texture he desires.

His media is applied thickly in abstract patches of color that merge together when viewed from afar to form complex scenes of heightened realism. “These are landscapes, but they are very process oriented,” Schiebold explains.

His representational style continues to carry the influence of his early abstract paintings: Schiebold was active in the New York abstract art scene of the 1970s and his paintings were displayed in major museums on the east coast and featured in international museum shows.

Hans Schiebold lived in WWII Germany, then communist East Germany, before coming to America where he earned his MFA and became a professor of Fine Art at Wesleyan.

Like many who arrive in America, he was driven to succeed. Instead of starting a small business, or studying rocket science, Professor Schiebold committed himself to teaching and painting.

As a result, his paintings reflect a hard earned knowledge, a challenge to former students, and an invitation to discover dynamic landscapes in the NW.

As a fellow gym rat I see Professor Schiebold often enough to share his enthusiasm of our natural beauty. One morning I raved about the place I’d recently discovered, the Oneonta Gorge on the Oregon side of the Columbia.

A small group and I climbed the log jam you see in the top picture, waded the creek, and swam in the pool under a waterfall.

Hans Schiebold listened with a bemused expression, like he knew the place.

I explained the eighth wonder of the world and he seemed to take a pass. That’s when he said he was a painter and the Oneonta Gorge was one of his subjects.

Color me stunned.

His Oneonta Gorge pumps up the memory of the place on one hand, and creates a new experience on the other. His command of color and space reveals a hidden world to those who dare the Oneonta hike, and a sense of disbelief to those who’ve never seen such a place.

Like the masterworks of other celebrated painters, Hans Schiebold unlocks a world invisible to the living. He combines intense landscapes and Oregon views to create a new world to explore.

What more would you expect from a force of nature?

Find a Schiebold near you.

What you’ll see at the end of the Oneonta Gorge:

via boomerpdx