On the last warm day of early October I was in a garden in Glenview drawing the last stand of some rosinweed and coneflower blossoms when a flicker of motion caught my eye and for a few seconds I saw a little fairy under the coneflowers. She must have sensed my gaze because she scurried into the foliage and I couldn't see where she went. I had to sketch her into my drawing from memory.
This painting of houses on a canal in Murano, near Venice, will be in the Chicago Association of Visual Artists Members Exhibition at Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 West 35th Street in Chicago, in the 3rd floor gallery. There will be an Opening Reception on Friday, Sept. 15 from 6 to 10pm, and another reception on Friday, Oct. 20 from 7 to 10pm. Gallery hours are Mon.-Sat. 8am to 6pm and Sun. 8am to noon. The show will be open daily through Oct. 28, 2023.
When I visit museums of art or natural history or folklore or toys, sometimes I like to sketch dimensional folk personages, be they puppets, marionettes, dolls, masks, or in this case Clayoquot house posts from the Pacific Northwest. When I drew these before the COVID pandemic in a natural history museum, there were only dark museum walls behind them which I didn't draw. Yesterday I was in a Forest Preserve and I found a stand of living and fallen trees, leafless and silhouetted against a bright sky. I decided to draw them. When I was paging through my sketchbook to find a blank page I came across my totem drawing and realized the winter woods would be a perfect background for it so I drew them in.
My painting GRAIN will be on exhibit through November 5 at Evanston Art Center, 1717 Central Street in Evanston, Illinois. There will be an Artists Reception on Sunday, October 16 from 1 to 4pm. All are welcome.
This painting is in the current CAVA-sponsored exhibition A MOMENT OF ZEN at the North Shore Art League second floor gallery in the Winnetka Community House at 620 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 9am to 8pm and Sat.-Sun. 9am to 5pm.
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| Twilight at the Marina, 13 x 9 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD
A little over a month ago, just before the coronavirus plague, I was in Tennessee visiting relatives and celebrating family birthdays. There is a marina on Percy Priest Lake about a mile from my sister's house in Nashville, but it's not as visually interesting as the marina on the far side of the Percy Priest Dam, so that's where I went to sketch. I made the ink drawing on-site and finished the painting at home with the addition of watercolor and a few touches of colored pencil. UPDATE! I am happy to announce that this painting is in the current WE'RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT, OR ARE WE? exhibition at Stola Gallery in Chicago, and it has been sold. (August 11, 2020)
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| San Marco Façade, Venice, 9 x 12 inch ink drawing by George C Clark AVAILABLE
Here's a real blast from the past! I recently found this little drawing in an old file I hadn't opened on decades. It was originally a page from the book of heavy Canson paper in which I began my series of on-site "Traveler's Sketchbook" watercolors when my wife and I were touring Europe by train in the late summer and fall of 1976. The watercolors I did on that trip are mostly long since sold, but in those early days I was only showing watercolor paintings in my exhibitions and this drawing got filed away never exhibited. Ten years later I began working sometimes in the medium of ink and watercolor for this series. In the last decade as my mobility has declined I have begun doing ink drawings on-site and adding color at home, or sometimes exhibiting the ink drawings without color.
For this drawing I did the light linework with a Rapidograph technical drawing pen with a no.1 or no. 0 point. The heavy blacks were added with a Sharpie felt-tip pen. I just looked at a blown-up map of the Piazza San Marco to determine that I did the drawing at one of the outermost tables of the Caffe Quadri's outdoor seating. This Caffe has been there since the 18th Century. It was expensive in 1976 and I understand the prices are even more outrageous today. However, I got a real kick out of sipping Campari-and-sodas at an establishment previously patronized by Casanova, William Dean Howells, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann and Federico Fellini.
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