An important American painter for the last five decades, Cornelia Schulz has made, in her words, the “process of organic, controlled accident, interrelating with geometric form” the guiding principle behind each of her paintings.  Long recognized in the San Francisco Bay Area for her paintings and her role in arts education at the University of California Davis Art Department, Schulz’s works have been critically overlooked at the national level and deserve greater recognition.

While Cornelia Schulz’s career as an artist appears to start with her first paintings in the 1970s, it actually begins much earlier.  Born in Pasadena, CA, in 1936, Schulz earned an AA from Pasadena City College in 1955 and enrolled at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) for two years alongside fellow students John Mason, Billy Al Bengston, and Kenneth Price, all of whom would later become famous artists in their own right.  In 1957, she would also take a summer drawing course taught by Richard Diebenkorn at the University of Southern California. 

At this point, before committing herself to a life in art, Schulz took a job at the Institute of Living, a private mental health center in Hartford, CT, for ten months.  Realizing that was not the place for her, she returned to California and attended the California School of Fine Arts (later known as San Francisco Art Institute), where she earned her BFA in painting in 1960 and her MFA in welded steel sculpture in 1962. Shortly after graduation, Schulz married Robert Hudson (1938-2024), a fellow student at the time and future important American sculptor, and within a year had her first child.  Marriage and motherhood would eventually lead Schulz to putting aside her career as an artist for most of the following decade.

Schulz returned to making sculpture in 1969 and continued in that mode for the next few years, all while her marriage to Hudson was coming to an end.  Around 1974, Schulz left sculpture behind and began making abstract paintings on large rectangular canvases, often measuring five or six feet on a side.  These early works in paint employed broad areas of abstract brushstrokes layered across a smoothly painted, underlying geometric compositional structure.  Schulz’s influences for these works stemmed from the rise of minimalism in American painting in the 1960s and, among others, the works of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, though she took these inspirations and filtered them through a lens uniquely her own.  Schulz would explore this aesthetic territory for the rest of the decade and through the 1980s.  The following year, Schulz was awarded the 1975 SECA Grant Award by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for her paintings, which included an exhibition at the museum.

Concurrent with Schulz’s shift in focus to painting, she also began her career as an educator at the university level.  Her first position was teaching Fundamental Sculpture for one year at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts in San Francisco) in 1972.  Following this, she applied for and got a position teaching in the art department at UC Davis in 1973 alongside such legendary faculty members Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, and Wayne Thiebaud.  Schulz became the first female chair of the department in 1988, serving through 1992, and was re-appointed to the position again from 1995-1996.  Among her many honors and achievements as an educator, Schulz received UC Davis’ Distinguished Public Service Award in 2000 for bringing to the University the landmark K-12 arts outreach program, ArtsBridge, which sees UC students teaching in the community.  On her retirement in 2002, Schulz was named Professor Emeritus.

With her first appointment as Chair of the art department, Schulz’ time in her studio diminished and with it came the end of her producing large-scale paintings. Around 1994, however, Schulz began working with small shaped canvas covered panels that she would individually cut and build by hand, and paint using oil, acrylic, and alkyd resin.  These would then be assembled into elaborate compositions that never exceeded a couple of feet on a side. Schulz would explore these interlocking, “building block” works for the next 20 years.  A defining feature in many of these works are areas of oil paint that display heavily wrinkled skins, onto which Schuls has added and wiped away black paint to highlight the surface texture.

In early 2014, Schulz began her most recent series of paintings, which have remained at the same approximate small scale.  Unlike the previous body of work, however, the underlying hand cut, shaped canvas wrapped panels in these works are now one united surface for her to work on.  To them Schulz applies and manipulates large quantities of oil paint using pallet knives and scrapers, “piling up” the paint until at times it becomes a mass of swirling vibrant colors upwards of an inch thick.  Schulz’s handling of the paint and the buildup of its physicality in each work is in direct dialogue with, and relationship to, the shape of the underlying support.  The painted shapes, colors, and other details all appear to influence the shape of the canvas, while simultaneously the shape of the canvas appears to influence the direction of the paint.  In this series, the canvases appear tilted on the wall, imparting a visual tension in each work, though they are hung in direct relationship to the vertical/horizontal axis of the floor, ceiling and wall.