Michael Schaff: Peace is Flowing Like a River

November 8, 2025 - January 24, 2026

Michael Schaff, Josephine, ND, colored pencil on paper, 14 x 17 in., 

Not for sale; Courtesy of L'Arche of Greater Washington, DC

Art Enables is honored to present a small survey of the work of Michael Schaff (1945 – 2025), an artist with a decades-long history of exceptional artistry and participation in a rich community in Washington, DC. Schaff was the founding, core member of the DC chapter of L’Arche, a vibrant organization offering community-based shared living and professional direct support for individuals with disabilities. He was also a resident artist at Art Enables from 2003 – 2020, and a member of the long-standing “Friday class” painting group led by artist and educator Rex Weil and friends from the 1990’s up until his passing. 

This exhibition offers works made in both settings, showing how his signature style manifested in both acrylic paint and mixed media drawings. No matter his medium, Schaff constructed his scenes through layers of gestural mark-making that imbue his subjects with incredible movement, energy, and emotion. Thousands of deft, intuitive marks built works that read like maps, storms, battles, or some combination of all three. He evoked the canny gestural lines of Cy Twombly and the urgent dynamism of Joan Mitchell, all while being unknown to the wider art world, and famous within his own deeply connected DC community of artists, housemates, friends, and neighbors. 

While Michael's drawings may present as haphazard scribbles at first glance, viewing his marks for more than a moment reveal their obvious intentionality. His many layers of brisk, directional colored pencil and ink markings capture hurricanes of detail in the scenes he chooses to depict, which are often pulled from books and inspired by historical figures and events. Schaff had a particular love of capturing First Ladies, as well as historical players like Napoleon, of whom several portraits can be found in this show. In “Napoleon Bonaparte Coronation,” we can feel the power of both the primary figures in the foreground—seeming to rise up from a festering storm cloud like conjoined, red tornadoes—and the great mass of people gathered to witness the scene, indicated by clusters and constellations of small circles and dashes. The importance, vastness, and atmospheric depth of the event are all communicated with immediacy.

In “People Talkin’” one can also feel the intentionality of Schaff’s marks. While the people are indicated by irregular, blob-shaped outlines, some are brought clearly to the foreground, emphasized in black. They’re loosely contained in a dense nest of gestural and feathery colored pencil lines, including some sections of color that seem to indicate parts of a landscape or an interior where the people are “talkin’” to each other. Within those swathes, Schaff has also set many small, additional marks in distinct colors—each with its own clear purpose: representing a detail in his carefully-scanned reference image. Are some of these marks more people, maybe others trees or objects in a room? We can’t be sure in all cases. What’s clear is that the artist is keenly observing and transposing these details with the determination of a caffeinated pointillist, urgently and confidently translating the scene to reveal its maximal energies. 

Michael Schaff

A Goat (FRAMED), 2017

colored pencil on paper

11 x 14 in

SOLD

While the subjects of many of Schaff’s works—especially those without titles—may be left open to interpretation, the acrylic paintings on canvas he favored in his Friday class sometimes gift us with a decoder ring. Tucked behind the canvas and its cradle, we occasionally find a reference image pulled from one of the many historical books he loved to peruse and collect. We don’t need these guides to be transported by Schaff’s work. Still, it is a joy at times to connect the two and feel a sense of the artist as translator, distilling figures and shapes into his trademark, gestural components. 

In works like “Impressions of Breugel,” we get this opportunity via a page torn from an art history book. In Breugel the Elder’s “The Land of Cockaigne” (1567), the artist casts the inhabitants of an imaginary “land of plenty” in an unflattering light. They sprawl on the ground in a stupor of hedonistic excess, having abandoned the tools of their trades. But Schaff got straight down to business in his iteration of the scene, accounting for and purifying each of its key elements. In Schaff’s version, the figures on the ground meld and share equal importance with all sections of the background. The green shape that plays a star role in Schaff’s painting is a passive patch of grass in Breugel’s. Breugel’s figure in pink becomes a pink mass wedged in a corner of Schaff’s canvas, but we can see he hasn’t neglected to include the light grey shape of the figure’s undershirt. A tree and the table encircling it become one brown mass in Schaff’s painting, but small dots of color within it reveal his notation of its contents. In the far background, some sparse brown lines and a red dot capture Breugel’s figure falling from the sky onto a tree. Schaff’s painting loses Breugel’s narrative moralizing in favor of pure, electric seeing, and the result is an abstract landscape of painterly puzzle pieces we can re-assemble in countless new ways.

Even when they don’t depict it, the animated qualities of Schaff’s paintings and drawings prompt comparisons to the natural world. Clusters of lines swirl together like schools of fish in water or flocks of birds on currents of air. The movement of nature is summoned by the title of this exhibition, which is also the title of a hymn that was important to the artist. “Michael Schaff: Peace is Flowing Like a River” represents just a small fragment of the art Schaff made in his lifetime. Seeing it makes one want to keep seeing more—to continue the process of discovery and delight, unearthing surprising new complexities with each work. As it stands, the greater majority of Schaff’s artistic legacy is spread among those who appreciated it most: in the private homes of Art Enables patrons and collectors, and in the homes of other members of his extended circle, who also carry memories of the man himself—a core community member, singular talent, and beloved friend.   

Michael Schaff

Family at a Funeral (FRAMED), 2018

colored pencil on paper

16 x 20 in

$400

Heartfelt thanks to those who helped make this exhibition possible through the loaning of artwork, sharing of insight, and thoughtful support: Rex Weil and the Friday Class group, Stefan Bauschmid, and the many housemates, friends and assistants from L'Arche with whom Michael shared his life. 

Michael Schaff at Art Enables in 2017

installation views