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.
