At 84, William Schulman of Menomonie can look back on a life that was, as he put it mildly, “a nice story.”
He is an artist, art teacher and author who recently released his fourth book. He founded the art education department at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and headed it from 1966-1992.
He served as president of Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors and of the Wisconsin Art Educators Association.
And he has produced an abundance of paintings and mixed media works — some of them on Jewish subjects, including “Davening from the Bimah,” the oil paintings that appears on the cover of this High Holidays magazine and that he said was “my first Jewish scene.”
His life started in Winnipeg, Canada. Schulman is the son of Romanian immigrants who came there in the 1920s.
In a telephone interview on Aug. 18, Schulman credited his uncle with inspiring his interest in art. This uncle was a housepainter who loved to draw.
But that wasn’t the only reason for his interest. This uncle’s wife was “very religious” and wouldn’t allow him to do drawing. Schulman said she would tear up images she saw him make.
“I learned that there was power involved in images,” Schulman said, and that realization “double attracted me” to art.
Yet he did not take a straight path to becoming an artist. He did not graduate from high school. He went to Chicago to investigate becoming a student at the Art Institute there, but that experience “destroyed my feeling that I had talent” for some time.
He ended up in Milwaukee, where his family ultimately went, and he became a U.S. citizen, which in that era of the draft compelled him to enter the U.S. Army for two years.
After leaving the army, he eventually “lied my way” into the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, entering without having his high school diploma. He left with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
He brought something additional out of UWM — his wife, Shirley Seigel Schulman, 82 and also an artist. She was a native of the Superior area and she transferred from UW-Superior to UWM’s art department. They have four children.
Schulman decided to become an art teacher because “I never had enough courage about my abilities. I knew I couldn’t make it in the art world.”
Yet he discovered that he enjoyed teaching about as well as making art. He taught in the Milwaukee public schools and in Whitefish Bay before going to UW-Stout.
After his retirement, the couple continued to create at what they called the Studio Gallery, closing it in 2008.
When he first got into “the art world,” Schulman said, “99 percent of my friends were not Jewish.” Therefore, his being Jewish “didn’t seem to me to be important” to art work.
Nevertheless, artistic creativity involves looking “inside yourself to see what is in there,” and when he did he saw “inklings of my dad’s world” of Eastern European Jewishness.
Therefore, much of his work “goes back” to Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall in style, and many of Schulman’s early works had Jewish content, he said.
“I was able to believe that what was coming out was the essence of my personality,” he said. “Rather than shunning it, I accepted it.”
Additional works by the couple can be seen at the websites of Wisconsin Visual Artists and Portal Wisconsin.
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