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.