Nature, always a source of inspiration for Schumacher, is especially present in his later works – a source of representational elements which the artist now allows and sometimes even puts in the foreground of his paintings. Without planning to work towards a representational theme, birds occur frequently. The animals are not colored in, but merely sketched and drawn in a spontaneous manner. A very secure drawing style, which had already been fully developed in Schumacher’s early works, lets him handle his subject matter with great artistic ease and freedom. Despite being seemingly thematic, the representational drawings always remain part of a principally abstract painting, and in their shapes free to be associated in the viewer’s mind, more allusion than paraphrase, never a simple likeness of a found subject. The representational bird depictions are characterized by the same experimental freedom as the abstract paintings.