Monday, December 30, 2013

THE OXBOW INN, SAUGATUCK, MICHIGAN

Oxbow Inn, Saugatuck, Michigan, 29 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

Oxbow 1946, photo by Life Magazine photographer Loomis Dean

I painted the Oxbow Inn on-site in the 1980s while attending a week-long workshop at the Summer School of Art there conducted there by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It is the original structure of the famous art colony, having been constructed in the 19th century to house lumberjacks harvesting Michigan's old-growth forests.  It is now the headquarters of the school with student housing upstairs and gallery and lounge space and the kitchen downstairs.  Meals are eaten on the big verandas that surround part of the building.  There are a number of newer outbuildings that house studios and workspaces for various media, but I found the Inn the most interesting to paint.

The morning I started this painting was overcast, with the sky dark and threatening rain.  Most artists show the front of the building, where a wide veranda faces a lawn leading down to Oxbow Lagoon.  I preferred to paint the side of the building where I could show the white structure with a big dark forested dune looming over it, so I set up by the road where the cars are parked in the photo.  I liked the details in the foreground-- the propane canisters, the garbage cans, and especially the yellow duck whirly-gig.  While I was working, one of the kitchen workers came out to take a break, so I painted her in, too.  This is a case where a painting can be truer than a photograph.  To get a camera back far enough to include this whole facade you would have to tear down a couple of outbuildings and a bunch of trees.  

I found the 1946 photo online.  The truck is parked down by the shore of the Lagoon.  We painted models outdoors too, but mostly in a garden adjacent to the Inn.  The dune in the upper right of the photo is the one in the background of my painting.   

Thursday, December 26, 2013

FLORIDA KEYS PELICAN

Brown Pelican, Plantation Key, Florida,  10 x 8 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil drawing by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

Last spring one of the places we stopped at while driving up the keys from Key West to Miami was the Wild Bird Sanctuary on Plantation Key.  They rehabilitate injured wild birds there, and keep some that can't survive in the wild on display.  Others, like this wild brown pelican, just fly in and hang out because it's a cool place.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Another Round of STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST

Backyards, Chicago, watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE
I have posted this painting here before, but it is back because it is in another show.  It is one of two paintings I have in the exhibition STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST at the Southport and Irving Cafe and SIP Lounge at 4002 Southport in Chicago.  The show has been extended and will be up through the end of December.

Friday, November 8, 2013

STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST Exhibition in Chicago

Stony Island, the painting posted in the previous entry on this blog, is currently on view in "STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST," a show of art about Chicago curated by Sandie Bacon at the Southport and Irving Cafe and SIP Lounge at 4002 Southport in Chicago, in the Lakeview neighborhood.  The exhibit will be up through December 5, 2013.

Everyone is invited to the Artists' Reception on Wednesday, November 20 from 6:30 to 9:00pm.

Also in the show is my watercolor painting Backyards, Chicago, which can be seen if you scroll down about 5 posts on this blog.

STONY ISLAND (AFTER THE GREAT BLIZZARD)

Stony Island (After the Great Blizzard), 40 x 50 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark SOLD

Back in March I blogged about the exhibition I did at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago.  To recap, I had won a major prize and corporate purchase award in the 1978 Artists of Chicago and Vicinity show at the Art Institute.  When I told Esther Sparks, the curator of that show, that I was one of the many Chicago artists whose work was shown at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery in the museum's basement, she told me that she was the curatorial advisor to the Women's Board that ran that gallery.  She said they were planning to start a series of exhibitions each featuring the work of a sculptor and a painter (or other two-dimensional artist) and asked if I would like to have my work featured in one of those shows.  Would I ever!  She wanted to feature my large landscapes, and gave me some time to work on the project, which was fortunate, because right then the only large landscape I had had just been purchased by the international accounting firm now known as KPGM for its corporate offices.

At the time, I was more comfortable working in oil paint and pencil or colored pencil on paper than I was working on canvas or other supports, so that was my medium of choice.  The best really large heavy weight archival paper I could find was a hand-made Japanese printmaking paper called toyoshi that came in deckle-edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  It had a smooth absorbent surface that was perfect for printmaking, but it wasn't sized, so that liquid paint or ink would bleed when applied to its surface, and that surface was a little soft to draw on with pencils or other dry pigments.  I would have to size the paper to make it suitable to paint on.

You can size paper with egg whites or gelatin, but I decided clear acrylic medium was a better choice for my purposes.  Through a series of experiments I devised a formula of water and Liquitex matte medium and acrylic paint (for color) to prepare the paper.  Actually I created two formulas-- one stained the paper a paper-bag tan that was ideal for figures and some landscapes, and the other stained the paper a sort of pearly grey with hints of blues and violets that was perfect for other landscapes, like Stony Island.  Both formulas included either Liquitex iridescent bronze or iridescent pewter paints which contain mica flakes that give the paper's surface a slight luster.  I got the idea of using mica flakes from Japanese woodcut printers who sometimes add it to their inks.  I hung the paper vertically and applied the sizing liberally with a wide brush.  On the absorbent surface the color bleeds to an even tone without streaks or blotches that when dry is no longer absorbent and much better to draw and paint on.  On Stony Island you can see a bit of the toned paper color in the area between the white snow and the dark grey street pavement.

Stony Island is one of six large landscapes I painted in 1978-9.  My subjects ranged from rural scenes in down-state Illinois and Indiana to urban images of Chicago and the lakefront in Waukegan.  I originally went to the South Side to research a painting of the El (elevated railway) station where a line terminated at 63rd and Cottage Grove.  It was after the Great Blizzard of January 1979.  Front-end loaders and other earth-moving equipment had been used to clear enormous amounts of snow from the city streets.  Some snow was dumped into the lake, but a lot was dumped by the truck-full onto any vacant land in the city.  I got fascinated by the acres of snow mountains and wound up painting Stony Island not so much as a specific place but as an overview of the crazy snowscape left in the wake of that winter storm.  The details are accurate, however.  That's what busses looked like, that's how people dressed, that's the celebrity columnist whose picture was on the newspaper delivery trucks, and the stairs to the El station appear in the upper right corner of the painting.

None of my large landscapes sold at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery show, although several smaller paintings did.  

In those days the Art Institute used to support Chicago art by staging a big juried Artists of Chicago and Vicinity exhibition every second year.  I got another call from Esther Sparks who told me the museum had decided for 1980 that instead of an open juried show they would do two smaller invitational shows called Chicago and Vicinity Prizewinners Revisited, Parts 1 and 2, each on display for several months.  Part 1 would feature abstract work.  I would be in the representational Part 2.  Esther came to my studio and selected Stony Island for the exhibition.  It was originally scheduled to be up for three months, but the museum later asked if they could have it for a few more months so they wouldn't have to rehang their Borg-Warner Gallery, and it wound up being on display in that world-class art museum for seven or eight months altogether.

Since then all of those big oil and pencil on paper landscapes have been sold to various private and corporate collections.  Stony Island has been in many exhibitions, most recently in "Places: From Arcadia to Urban Landscape" at Murphy Hill Gallery in 2009, in my one-person exhibition at the John H. Vanderpohl Art Museum in Chicago in 2010 and in "STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST," the details of which are posted above.        

  



       

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

EVERGLADES ALLIGATOR, TAKE 2

Alligator, 7 x 18 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark    SOLD
When I was in Florida last May I tried to sketch alligators at the Everglades Alligator Farm just outside the Everglades National Park, but none of the gators would hold still long enough to be drawn.  I wound up drawing this across a double page spread in my sketchbook back at my South Beach hotel while looking at a couple of on-site photos displayed on my camera's screen.  I posted the right half of it back in May on this blog.  I have since cut the spread out of the sketchbook, flattened and framed it for my recent show at Arts on Elston, so I can now post the whole drawing.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

SOUTH BEACH TWILIGHT

South Beach Twilight, 10 x 14 inch watercolor and colored pencil by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

When I was in Miami Beach in May I went for a walk before supper one evening along the Atlantic at Lummus Park.  I really liked the soft twilight colors, but the light was fading too fast to work on-site so I did this painting later from memory and photos.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

2-DAY EXHIBITION AT ARTS ON ELSTON IN CHICAGO SEPTEMBER 27 AND 28, 2013

Santa Fe No. 92,  15 x 10 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I will be showing my watercolors and miniature rustic twig furniture in a two day group show at ARTS ON ELSTON, 3446 N. Albany in Chicago.  The gallery is located on the corner of Albany and Elston Avenues across the street from Chief O'Neill's Pub, two blocks east of Kedzie and south of Addison.  The exhibition will be open Friday, September 27 from 6 to 10pm, and Saturday, September 28 from 11am to 7pm.  The Friday night reception features musical guests Sean Cleland and the Irish Music School of Chicago.  The exhibition features the art of 15 artists, most of whom will be present both days.  On Saturday the gallery will be a stop on the AVONDALE ART WALK.

Santa Fe No. 92 is one of several subjects from the Illinois Railway Museum in the show.  Also shown will be watercolors of dancers and subjects from my recent trip to South Florida.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

CHICAGO COMES TO BELMONT, NEW YORK

Backyards, Chicago, 15 x 20 inch watercolor by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE
I have posted this painting here before but it's back because it is currently featured in the exhibition CHICAGO COMES TO BELMONT at the Fountain Arts Center in Belmont, New York.  More information about this group show is HERE.  The show's curator was looking for art that says "Chicago" and I can't think of anything more "Chicago" than this view across my fence of my neighbors' backyards.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

FLORIDA PRIMEVAL IN EXHIBITION AT PALETTE & CHISEL ACADEMY IN CHICAGO

Florida Primeval, the painting I posted in the previous entry, will be shown along with two of my figure drawings in the 2013 annual SCULPTURES & WORKS ON PAPER SHOW at the Palette & Chisel Academy of fine Arts, 1012 N. Dearborn in Chicago.  Everyone is invited to the opening reception on Friday, August 23 from 5:30 to 8:00pm.  The exhibition runs through September 2, 2013.

Friday, June 28, 2013

FLORIDA PRIMEVAL

Florida Primeval, 10.5 x 13.5 inch ink and watercolor painting by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE
I found this customer at the Everglades Alligator Farm just outside the Everglades National Park.  I saw plenty of wild alligators and even a couple of crocodiles too, but they were all in the water and mostly moving too fast to photograph, let alone draw.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

AUDUBON HOUSE, KEY WEST

Audubon House, Key West, 8 x 8.5 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

This is called the Audubon House because John James Aududon spent several weeks painting in the garden here in 1832 when he was working on his Birds of North America project.  The house here now was built about 20 years after Audubon's visit and is open to the public as a museum of Key West life in the mid-19th century.
 George C. Clark drawing the Audubon House               photo by Pat Clark

Friday, May 31, 2013

YELLOW HOUSE IN KEY WEST OLD TOWN

Yellow House, Key West, 10 x 8 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE
I sketched this conch house in Key West's Old Town from the balcony of the Eden House hotel a couple of weeks ago.  I hadn't been to the Florida Keys since I was 11.  I enjoyed it then, but I appreciated the experience a lot more this time.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

EVERGLADES ALLIGATOR

Everglades Alligator (detail), 8 x 17 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark
I tried to sketch this gator in the Florida Everglades last week, but he wouldn't hold still long enough to be drawn.  I photographed him, and did this drawing from my photographs.  I actually drew the whole gator across a 2-page spread of my 8 x 8.5 inch inch sketchbook.  It is on a single sheet of paper, but the middle of it is folded and stitched into the binding of the sketchbook.  I won't be able to flatten the drawing out to be properly photographed or framed until I cut the sketchbook's binding apart, which I fully intend to do, but just not yet.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

BEHIND THE SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO IN VENICE

Behind the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, 12 x 9 inch watercolor by George C, Clark    SOLD
I went to the Scuola di San Rocco to see the amazing giant murals by Tintoretto.  Afterward I painted this little watercolor of the canal behind the building.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Flemish Puppet PAGLIACCI

Flemish Puppet "Pagliacci," 15 x 10 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I found this marionette spotlit in a glass display case in the Folk Art Museum in Ghent, Belgium, and recorded him in my sketchbook.  Later, back home, I found a photo in a book of Enrico Caruso wearing the exact same costume and realized the puppet was Canio from the opera Pagliacci.  I redid my sketch in ink and watercolor and added the knife and the fallen body of Canio's faithless wife Nedda to recreate the final scene of the opera.

"La Commedia e' finita!" 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

DINOSAUR AT THE BUFFET

Dinosaur at the Buffet, 10 x 6.5 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark

The last three lengthy posts have been about art that I created over thirty years ago.  Let's look at something more recent.  Last Tuesday I was invited by friends to Members' Night at the Field Museum (Chicago's natural history museum).  I had a chance to see the new "Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence" exhibit and to do some sketching in the collection.  The evening included a very nice catered buffet supper served in the museum's big central Stanley Field Hall.  Coffee was dispensed under Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as I recorded above in my sketchbook.    

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

MATHON'S PARKING LOT-- A PAINTING FOR MY EXHIBITION AT THE ART RENTAL AND SALES GALLERY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Mathon's Parking Lot, 70 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
Collection of the Sandoz/Novarty Corporation of Switzerland

In the previous post I described what happened at the opening reception for the Art Institute of Chicago's 77th Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity: Works on Paper.  When my wife Pat and I left that event we were ecstatic and very hungry.  We decided to celebrate by having supper at one of our then-favorite restaurants, Mathon's in Waukegan.  Mathon specialized in seafood, and I believe he was the only Chicago-area restauranteur who still had a commercial fishing license for Lake Michigan.  We drove up Lake Shore Drive and Sheridan Road to Waukegan, arriving late but still in time to enjoy an excellent meal.  We were among the last diners to leave, and when we went out to the empty parking lot I was struck by the visual quality of the way a giant cement elevator across the street on the waterfront loomed over us against the night sky.  I thought the scene might make a good large-scale painting, and I went back a couple of weeks later on a Sunday afternoon and shot reference photos in daylight.  I used the photos to get the details right, but I painted the scene as it had looked at night.  I imagined myself 50 feet up in the air so that I was looking down at the herringbone pattern of the parking lot, but up at the cement elevator.  

Mathon's Parking Lot was one of six new large landscapes I painted for the Art Rental and Sales Gallery exhibition that featured my work and that of sculptor Joe Burlini, although only five of them made it into the show because I sold one of them out of my studio as I described in the previous post.  The gallery borrowed Indiana Cropduster from its new owner to fill out the exhibition, and we also showed some of my smaller landscapes and some of the on-site watercolors from my Traveler's Sketchbook series.  None of my really big paintings sold at the exhibition, but several of the smaller ones did.  The previous show in the same space had featured the work of one of my teachers at the School of the Art Institute, and I was pleased to note that my work outsold his both in quantity and dollar value (a petty observation, I know).

Mathon's Parking Lot was in a number of other exhibitions, and it won a prize at one of the Baer Competition exhibitions at Beverly Art Center.  About ten years after I painted it, Sandoz Crop Protection Corporation, the American subsidiary of Switzerland's chemical giant Sandoz, built a new corporate headquarters in DesPlaines, Illinois, and were looking for art with an agricultural theme.  An agent showed them my work and they purchased two paintings, including Mathon's Parking Lot. Years later Sandoz, now called Sandoz/Novarty, relocated its American operation back to Europe.  I've been told the art collection is now in Denmark.

      



Tuesday, March 5, 2013

THE ART INSTITUTE'S 77th EXHIBITION BY ARTISTS OF CHICAGO AND VICINITY: WORKS ON PAPER

A black-and-white photo of the 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting Indiana Cropduster by George C. Clark
as it appeared in the exhibition catalog.
(Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Image copyright 1978 George C. Clark.)

In the previous post I told how I came to paint Indiana Cropduster and submit it to the jury for the Chicago and Vicinity show.  I'll continue the story...

Competition was fierce for the Art Institute's semi-annual Chicago and Vicinity shows.  Over 1500 entries were winnowed down to fewer than a hundred selected by the jury.  I was delighted to get a letter announcing that my painting had been selected and a loan agreement contract for the exhibition.  (Here is a sidelight I found interesting about the loan agreement.  Art that is handmade by an artist is insured for its sale price while at the museum, but art that is thought up by an artist and then fabricated by a foundry or cabinetmaker is only insured for the cost of the materials and labor to fabricate a new replacement.)

As the exhibition neared I was even more thrilled to receive a phone call from Esther Sparks, curator of the exhibition and one of its three jurors, who told me she hoped I would be at the opening reception because my painting had been chosen for a major award.  Later she called again to tell me that my award was the Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company Purchase Award, and that the giant international accounting firm was buying Indiana Cropduster to hang in their Chicago corporate headquarters.  (This firm has since changed its name to KPMG.)  Apparently the jurors select the prizewinners, then sponsors are allowed to purchase prizewinners and have their names on the awards.  This was a huge break for a young unknown artist, to be exhibited in a world class art museum, to win a major award, and to have my work purchased for a prestigious corporate art collection!

But it got even better.  At the opening reception I met Esther Sparks and mentioned to her that I had been showing work at the Art Institute's Art Rental and Sales Gallery for almost four years.  She said that she was the curatorial advisor to the Women's Board of the Art Institute, the volunteer organization that ran the Art Rental and Sales Gallery in the lower level of the museum (where the photography galleries are today) to raise funds for the museum and to promote Chicago artists.  She said they were starting a new program of using part of their space for a series of two-month exhibitions featuring two artists each time drawn from their regular roster of exhibitors.  They were planning to pair a maker of wall-hung art with a sculptor for each exhibition, and did I want to do an exhibition of large landscapes there?  Did I ever!  Indiana Cropduster was the only really big landscape I had done at that point, but I had some time to work on the project and I got busy right away.

I got some more big sheets of heavy hand-made Japanese toyoshi paper.  With their rough deckle edges trimmed, they gave me a working area of 40 x 70 inches, big enough to be impressive but a lot easier to mount and frame than Indiana Cropduster.  I did two vertical paintings, one a night scene of a cement elevator on the waterfront in Waukegan looming over an empty parking lot that I called Mathon's Parking Lot, and one of the empty space downtown next to the Chicago River surrounded by high-rises where the city kept a big glistening mountain of blue-tinted salt for use on icy winter streets titled Where Salt Comes From.  I will show you both of those paintings in future posts.  The third painting I finished in that series was a horizontal landscape of the farm in Delphi, this one showing my wife's uncle in his tractor discing a field of corn stubble with her grandfather's old yellow house visible on the horizon.  I called that one Fall Plowing.

The Chicago and Vicinity show ran for several months in the fall and winter of 1978-9.  Toward the end of its run I got a call from the Art Institute putting me in touch with collectors interested in my work.  It was a young lawyer and his wife from Glencoe.  They told me they liked Indiana Cropduster so much they would have bought it if it hadn't already been sold, and asked if I had any more big landscapes.  I invited them to my home/studio to see the three new unframed paintings I had finished at that point.  They purchased Fall Plowing.          
I regret I don't have a decent photograph of Fall Plowing, but the only slides I had were ones I shot inside the Electric Cycle studio where the lighting was really bad and they were spoiled by visible glare.  Speaking of photos, the black-and-white picture at the top of this post was shot by the Art Institute's photographer for use in the exhibition catalog.  It was shot through the plexiglas without any reflections or glare.  That's the work of a real pro.  And, unlike the color photo in my previous post, it is in sharp focus.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

INDIANA CROPDUSTER

Indiana Cropduster, 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
SOLD to KPMG Corporate Collection, Chicago

I don't usually consider Indiana Cropduster to be part of my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series, but since I did travel to research its subject, I'll tell how I came to paint it here.

In 1976 and 1977 I was working a lot in the medium of oil and pencil on paper, both for my figures and landscapes.  Mostly I was working on 23 x 29 inch sheets of Strathmore kid finish bristol drawing paper.  I had been showing and selling landscapes at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.  Usually the gallery didn't want to jury art bigger than 60 inches, but this time they announced a special jurying for wall-hung pieces that were at least 5 x 4 feet, preferably larger.  It seems that one of the city's private social clubs was redecorating their space in a Loop building, and they wanted to buy some big new art.  The gallery gave its artists plenty of warning about this special jurying and I accepted the challenge.

I decided to paint a subject I knew well, the Indiana countryside where my wife Pat's relatives had a big farming operation near Lafayette.  I had painted some of my first landscapes there, as I recounted at the beginning of this blog.  The next time we went there I brought my camera and sketchbook and worked out the composition of this painting.  I decided that what is most characteristic of that part of Indiana is how flat it is and how it has all been gridded up by roads and railroads and almost completely covered by plantings of corn and sometimes soybeans.  I thought of two ways to depict it.  A very wide skinny painting could emphasize the land's flatness, but it wouldn't show the gridding.  I decided instead to use a device I'd seen in the work of two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Paul Hogarth.  I would keep the horizon very high and look down on the land as if I was 50 feet up in a cropdusting airplane.  The painting would be true and would convey more information than any photograph I could take at ground level.  The old Farm Co-op grain elevator stood along the Monon Railroad track just outside the tiny town of Ockley, about a three-quarter mile walk from the home of Pat's aunt and uncle.  The pick-up truck belonged to Pat's cousin.

The biggest heavy archival paper I could find was handmade Japanese toyoshi paper that came in deckle edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  I sliced the deckle off a long side of two sheets and spliced them together using one of the cut off pieces glued across the seam on the paper's back side to secure them.  I then taped my giant sheet to the wall of my studio, a storefront I was sharing with three other artists, and started painting.  

It took me about 3 weeks to finish the painting, although I wasn't working all day everyday on it since I was also working with life models sometimes in the same space.  The hardest part was painting literally thousands of cornstalks leaf by leaf starting at the bottom until they feathered out about two thirds of the way up the painting.  It was worth doing though, because it gave the painting an obsessive quality and was the best way to describe the sheer volume of corn I wanted to depict.

Work presented for this special jurying didn't have to be framed.  I trimmed the painting to 70 x 77 inches and tipped it onto a backing I constructed by overlapping two layers of 40 x 60 inch quarter- inch foamcore sheets that was a few inches larger all around than the painting.  I then wrapped the whole thing in clear acetate for protection, having spliced the acetate with clear tape to get it big enough.

My friend Marilyn Packer knew several artists who were submitting work and she arranged to borrow a bakery truck to deliver the art on a rainy Saturday.  Unfortunately, the back door of the truck was smaller than we expected, and Marilyn's canvas wouldn't fit through it, although the other art did.  She wound up tying her painting to the back of the truck with rope, and I drove right behind the truck with my flashers going because her painting covered the truck's tail lights.  Her painting was a little wet from drizzle by the time we got to the Art Institute loading dock, but it was an oil painting and proved to be undamaged once she dried it off.  We all waited longer than usual for the jury results, and when they came we were all informed that the club had changed its mind and purchased nothing, and all the art would have to be picked up.  The Art Institute was as bummed as the artists were.  I got Indiana Cropduster back and hung it on the wall of my studio.

Flash forward several months, maybe a year...

The Art Institute announced that its big semi-annual juried show, the 77th Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition, will be limited to "Works On Paper" in 1978.  Is this fortuitous or what?  I now needed to frame Indiana Cropduster, and because I knew any professional framer would charge a fortune to do anything that big, I decided to do it myself.  I constructed a stretcher frame an inch larger all around than the painting out of 1 x 6 inch redwood planks.  Then I stretched linen canvas around the redwood and secured it on the back with staples.  I sized the front of the canvas with clear acrylic medium to make the canvas shrink and tauten, and also to glue the fabric to the redwood where they are in contact.  I used nails and glue to fasten lengths of three-quarter inch square wood molding all around the perimeter of the top surface of the stretched canvas.  The visible surfaces of the molding and the adjacent inch of canvas were painted matte black.  Narrow strips of archival acid-free museum board that would be concealed by the painting were tipped around the outer edges of the canvas, and finally the painting was carefully tipped onto the outer edges of the museum board strips with water-soluble glue.  (The purpose of the museum board strips is to enable the painting to be removed from the frame if ever necessary by popping the strips free of the stretcher without putting undo stress on the paper of the painting.)

I wanted to photograph the painting, but there was no way I could get enough even light on a surface that big to do it inside the studio, so we carried it outside and leaned it against the wall of our storefront.  Pat held it to keep the wind from knocking it over while I stepped back into Sheffield Avenue between passing traffic to shoot 35mm slides of it, which is what you see posted above.

I bought a giant sheet of plexiglas to lay across the black molding risers that would keep it from touching the painting's surface.  I had to fabricate my frame stock out of base molding and big quarter-rounds which I stained and varnished myself because I needed it to have a much wider than normal lip that would cover the molding risers you see around the painting in the photograph.  I paid a framer to cut my frame stock to size on their mitre-saw.  I assembled the four frame segments with glue and small nails, and when we lowered the frame over the plexiglas and stretcher, miraculously, everything fit perfectly.  It had taken several days' hard work, but I had kept my out-of-pocket framing expenses to a minimum.  I paid a "Man with a Van" who  advertised in the local underground newspaper $25 to drive me and the painting to the warehouse downtown where the jurying would take place.  I think I'll save what happened next for another post.       

    

      

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

NEW TRAVELER'S SKETCHBOOK EXHIBITION IN CHICAGO

Backyards, Chicago, 15 x 20 inch watercolor by George C. Clark    Available
Eight of the paintings from my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series along with two large studio landscapes are currently on exhibit at Alderman John Arena's 45th Ward Office Gallery at 4754 North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.  The Ward Office is open Monday through Friday from 8:00am to 6:00pm, and the exhibition will run through April, 2013.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

SAN MOISE, VENICE

San Moise, Venice, 29 x 23 oil on paper painting by George C. Clark    SOLD

I had to cross this bridge and walk through the little campo in front of the Church of San Moise to get to San Marco from the hotel I was staying at in Venice.