Schall & Waddell Jazz Party

In a creative partnership, Sedona Arts Center and Goldenstein Gallery are hosting a Jazz Party and Art Reception on Saturday, January 19, 5-7pm as part of the innovative Keith Schall and John Waddell special exhibition at the Sedona Arts Center. Frost and Frost will be performing live.

Open 10am-5pm daily through January 22 in Sedona Arts Center’s Special Exhibition galleries, this exciting special exhibition combines the muted yet bold abstract paintings by Schall with the impressionist sculpture of John Waddell. The Jazz Party is January 19 and there will also be a classical music concert January 22, 4-6pm.

Keith Schall (1943-2018) was inspired by literature, myth and jazz music—literature because of his background as a professor, myth because it involves broadly human experience, and jazz because of its spontaneity and energy.

“My art is abstract because it understands and reflects the real universe, not the one we see unaided, but the one comprised of vibrating atoms, which includes the paint I use and the hand that holds the brush.”

Schall always felt that abstract art shouldn’t be confined to a square or rectangle canvas and took his expressions beyond the edge of conventional canvas, creating unique shapes to his paintings.

Among Schall’s influences were the French impressionists, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and non-representation artists like Vassily Kandinsky and Willem deKooning. Beyond the art world, Schall relied on English poet John Keats for his sense of empathetic awareness and Sigmund Freud’s picture of the human psyche. He tried to depict external conflict, impulses, ironies, feelings and the ideas and atoms of which we are all made in his paintings.

Schall’s paintings are also featured in the Sedona Arts Center’s Fine Art Gallery exhibit upstairs with works by Joella Jean Mahoney, Joe Beeler, Nasson Gobran and Max Ernst.

John Waddell began his professional art career in 1937 and has since created a visually moving body of bronze sculpture and paintings. An intrinsic part of the Arizona art world for more than forty years, he has taught and exhibited his work, both in one-man shows and permanent displays, throughout the state. A prolific artist, there are 14 public venues in Phoenix alone, where his work is on display. He has also had exhibitions and permanent installations throughout the US.

Best known for bronze sculptures of female nudes in motion, Waddell attended the Art Institute of Chicago and had his first solo show in Peoria, Illinois at age 21. He served in the military and the G.I. Bill financed the remainder of his formal education: two M.F.A.s in Fine Arts and Art Education. He and his wife, Ruth, a close partner in his professional as well as his personal life, moved to Arizona in 1957. Here he headed the Art Education Department at Arizona State University (then Arizona State College) for several years. During this time Waddell made sculpture his primary art form.

At age 43 he resigned from teaching to become a full-time sculptor. His moving body of work has been collected nationwide from the Mondavi Vineyards in Napa Valley, California to the Flushing Meadows Tennis Center in New York City. His sculptures are exhibited in many places in Arizona, including the Civic Plaza, in front of the Herberger Theater and the Phoenix Art Museum.

Meet John and see his life size and maquette sculptures and Keith Schall’s paintings on January 19, 5-7pm in Sedona Arts Center’s Special Exhibition Galleries located at 15 Art Barn Road in Uptown Sedona. Visit Goldensteinart.com for additional information on these artists and their art or call Sedona Arts Center at 928-282-3809 or Goldenstein Gallery at 928-204-1765.