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.