‘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.’
Themes for his work come from literature, myth, and Jazz: literature because of his background as a professor, myth because it involves broadly human experience, and jazz because of its spontaneity and energy.
Among Schall’s influences are the French impressionists, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and nonrepresentation artists like Vassily Kandinsky and Willem deKooning. Beyond the art world, Schall counts English Poet John Keats for his sense of empathetic awareness and Sigmund Freud’s picture of the human psyche.
He tries to depict all of this in his paintings: external conflict, impulses, ironies, feelings and the ideas and atoms that we are all made of.