PLOW ZONE

Plow Zone,  24 x 40 inch oil and pencil over acrylic sized paper by George C. Clark    SOLD

Plow Zone is a studio painting of spring plowing in the corn and soybean fields around my wife's late aunt and uncle's farm in Carroll County, Indiana.  I stained a sheet of Japanese Toyoshi printmaking paper a paper bag brown color with an acrylic sizing process I described earlier.  Then I washed in the sky color in semi-opaque acrylic.  The painting was completed with oil paint and Prismacolor colored pencils.  It was purchased in the 1980s for the corporate offices in Desplaines, Illinois, of the Sandoz Crop Protection Corporation, the American subsidiary of Sandoz/Novartis AG of Switzerland.  The American operation was eventually relocated back to Europe, and I have been told its art collection is now in Denmark.

The title Plow Zone is the archeological term that describes the first foot or two of soil in a cultivated field where found artifacts cannot be dated by their depth because you have to assume the earth has been jumbled repeatedly by plows and other cultivating implements.  After a rainfall on recently plowed earth is the best time for archeologists to do a field survey looking for artifacts on the surface as indicators of a site's potential for further study and possible excavation.

ART SALE AT THE PALETTE AND CHISEL SATURDAY APRIL 26

Audubon House, Key West, 8.5 x 9 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

This little ink and watercolor landscape is one of 6 works on paper I will have in the Art Sale at the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts at 1012 N. Dearborn Street in Chicago next Saturday, April 26, from 11am to 4pm.  This sale features hundreds of work in various mediums.  My other paintings in the sale will be a railroad image and four female nudes.

AN AFTERNOON IN THE COUNTRY

An Afternoon in the Country, 30 x 40 inch oil and colored pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

Some years ago I did an exhibition of landscapes with an art dealer in Lake Forest, Illinois, a posh old money suburb on the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago.  She wanted to show some art with local interest, so I painted a couple of Lake Forest subjects, including this painting which I titled House in Lake Forest.  Several of my Italian landscapes sold, but not this painting, even though the dealer showed it to both the family that built the house in the 1920s and its current owner.  So I added the three Lombardy poplar trees which weren't there, changed the title to An Afternoon in the Country, and now I tell people it's in the suburbs of Paris.  The music room is at the right.