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| Lobstermen's Dock, Perkins Cove, ME |
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| Trawler Linda, Gloucester Harbor MA |
Going through old art recently, I found these two on-site drawings I did years ago in a sketchbook I took on a trip to New England. I can't exhibit the originals because they are not on archival paper, but maybe I can use them as prints or posters.
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.
My painting GRAIN will be on exhibit through November 5 at Evanston Art Center, 1717 Central Street in Evanston, Illinois. There will be an Artists Reception on Sunday, October 16 from 1 to 4pm. All are welcome.
This painting is in the current CAVA-sponsored exhibition A MOMENT OF ZEN at the North Shore Art League second floor gallery in the Winnetka Community House at 620 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois. Gallery hours are Mon.-Fri. 9am to 8pm and Sat.-Sun. 9am to 5pm.
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| Twilight at the Marina, 13 x 9 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD
A little over a month ago, just before the coronavirus plague, I was in Tennessee visiting relatives and celebrating family birthdays. There is a marina on Percy Priest Lake about a mile from my sister's house in Nashville, but it's not as visually interesting as the marina on the far side of the Percy Priest Dam, so that's where I went to sketch. I made the ink drawing on-site and finished the painting at home with the addition of watercolor and a few touches of colored pencil. UPDATE! I am happy to announce that this painting is in the current WE'RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT, OR ARE WE? exhibition at Stola Gallery in Chicago, and it has been sold. (August 11, 2020)
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| San Marco Façade, Venice, 9 x 12 inch ink drawing by George C Clark AVAILABLE
Here's a real blast from the past! I recently found this little drawing in an old file I hadn't opened on decades. It was originally a page from the book of heavy Canson paper in which I began my series of on-site "Traveler's Sketchbook" watercolors when my wife and I were touring Europe by train in the late summer and fall of 1976. The watercolors I did on that trip are mostly long since sold, but in those early days I was only showing watercolor paintings in my exhibitions and this drawing got filed away never exhibited. Ten years later I began working sometimes in the medium of ink and watercolor for this series. In the last decade as my mobility has declined I have begun doing ink drawings on-site and adding color at home, or sometimes exhibiting the ink drawings without color.
For this drawing I did the light linework with a Rapidograph technical drawing pen with a no.1 or no. 0 point. The heavy blacks were added with a Sharpie felt-tip pen. I just looked at a blown-up map of the Piazza San Marco to determine that I did the drawing at one of the outermost tables of the Caffe Quadri's outdoor seating. This Caffe has been there since the 18th Century. It was expensive in 1976 and I understand the prices are even more outrageous today. However, I got a real kick out of sipping Campari-and-sodas at an establishment previously patronized by Casanova, William Dean Howells, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann and Federico Fellini.
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| Art Fair, 7 x 8 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
I drew this little sketch some years ago at an outdoor art fair at Beverly Art Center on Chicago's far south side. This was at their old location, a few blocks east of where they are now.
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| Meijer Garden Pond, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 9.5 x 9.5 inches ink, watercolor & colored pencil AVAILABLE
I drew this water feature at the Meijer Gardens during a visit to Grand Rapids in October. The bright green stuff floating at the edge of the water is duckweed
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| Arlington Street Marina, Jacksonville, 5.5 x 8.5 ink drawing by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
The Arlington Street Marina on the St. Johns River was across the street from the cottage we rented in Jacksonville. I went over one morning after breakfast and sketched this tugboat being refitted.
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| Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, 8.5 x 15.5 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
Here is the full color version of a drawing I made on-site in Florida recently.
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| Where the Pirates Came Ashore, 8.5 x 14.5 ink and watercolor by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
I drew this on Jekyll Island, one of the southernmost of the barrier islands along Georgia's Atlantic coast a few weeks ago. It was an overcast day and in fact it rained while we were indoors having a late lunch of grilled freshly caught shrimp. Afterwards we drove around the island and I found this spot to draw. It looked like a sleepy tropical backwater and it felt like I was creating an illustration for a story like Treasure Island or Captain David Grief, so I gave it an appropriate title. I had about finished the drawing when a gigantic ship came down the channel between the island and the Georgia mainland visible on the horizon. It turns out that is a deepwater channel linking the port of Brunswick to the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was as big as a container ship, but instead of being stacked with containers it was a big enclosed box with a huge hatch on its stern. I had never seen anything like it, but I live in Chicago where we don't see many oceangoing ships. When we drove back to Jacksonville I saw a similar ship docked further up the estuary next to a huge lot filled with thousands of brand new cars.
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| Ancient Gate, Aachen, 28 x 22 inch oil and colored pencil on paper by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
Some years ago my wife and I took advantage of a real bargain airfare and flew to Brussels, Belgium in January. We rented a car and did a leisurely circuit visiting Bruges and Ghent in Belgium, and Zierikzee, Holland, the former home town of a friend in Chicago, before crossing into northwestern Germany, where I had arranged an invitation for us to stay overnight and have a private tour of Ramstein Air Force Base. I could do that because I was an active contributing artist in the US Air Force Art Program in those days. We stayed in Wertheim and Frankfort too, before heading back to Brussels by way of Aachen. We enjoyed the trip a lot in spite of the short days and cold weather (not as cold as Chicago), but I didn't get any on-site painting done. I did do several paintings back home from the copy photos I took in Europe, and this is one of them. This old tower is about all that's left of the city walls that protected Aachen when it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne. I researched this painting on a morning when an overnight snow had left the park grass covered and the street slushy.
I recently reworked parts of this painting and reformatted it to a smaller size. I used to show all my works on paper with mattes inside a larger frame, and I still do that with drawings or watercolors that have bare white paper showing. However, I now like to show art where almost the whole surface is covered with paint (like this one) without a matte and framed like a canvas or painting on a hard panel would be, although it still needs to be covered with plexiglas.
For years I've been a member of the informal Artists Breakfast Group that meets Wednesday mornings at the S&G Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue at its intersection with Wellington and Southport Avenues in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. We are invited to show our art on a restaurant wall in a rotating exhibition. For the next 2 or 3 months you can see Ancient Gate, Aachen there. The food is good and the portions are generous. Look for the "Breakfast Specials" menu.
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| Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, 8 x 15.5 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
I made this drawing last month at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve on the Atlantic coast north of St. Augustine, Florida, a lovely stretch of beach, dunes, and coastal wetlands. Swimmers, surfers and fishermen can access the beach, but only via wooden boardwalks that protect the fragile plants that anchor the dunes in place. I drew from an overlook on one of those boardwalks across a 2-page spread in my sketchbook, which I later cut out of its binding and flattened for framing. I will probably do a full color version of this image with watercolors.
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| George C. Clark drawing beach dunes in Florida. Photo by Pat Clark. |
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| Notre Dame de Paris from the Quai se Montebello, 24 x 18 inch oil and pencil on paper by George C. Clark SOLD
Let's crank up Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine and look at one of the oldest pieces I've posted here. I spent the summer of 1976 attending the New York Studio School summer session in Paris. My wife and I sublet an apartment in Passy and every weekday I painted either from nude models in a studio at the American Center for Artists and Students on the Boulevard Raspail or at various outdoor locations around Paris, all under the tutelage of New York painters Elaine deKooning and Leland Bell. I painted this the day the class set up on the Seine riverfront across from the cathedral. I never exhibited this painting because when we got back home from Europe I showed friends some of my work from Paris, and one of them bought this on the spot. Thanks, Jim.
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| South Side Halloween, 36 x 80 inch acrylic on panel by George C. Clark AVAILABLE This large Chicago landscape is one of three paintings I have in the CHICAGO: INsideOUT exhibition at the Bridgeport Art Center at 1200 W. 35th Street in Chicago. There is a large free parking lot on the north side of the building. Enter the building on the side facing Racine Avenue and take the elevator to the third floor gallery. The exhibition will be up from September 21 through October 19, 2018. Work by 75 artists will be shown. Collectors' Preview: Friday, September 21 from 5:00 to 7:00pm Opening Reception: Friday, September 21 from 7:00 to 10:00pm Closing Reception: Friday, October 19 from 7:00 to 10:00pm |
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| Mr. Punch, the Doctor & the Devil, 8 x 11 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark AVAILABLE I made this pen and ink drawing of Punch and Judy Show hand puppets on-site in the Toy Museum in Brighton, England and added the watercolor later. It will be exhibited in the Chicago Alliance of Visual Artists show 2018 LATER IMPRESSIONS at the Old Town Triangle Art Center, 1763 N. North Park Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614 from September 4 to 26, 2018. There will be an Artists' Reception on Sunday, September 9, from 2 to 5pm. All are welcome. |
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| The Cabinet Shop at Shake Rag AlleyArt Center, Mineral Point, Wisconsin, (.5 x 13.5 graphite pencil and watercolor by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
I'm just back from participating in the annual WOODLANDERS GATHERING at Shake Rag Alley Art Center in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. What a great 4-day festival of rustic arts and crafts! We always enjoy being with other creative people and seeing old friends and making new ones. I did this little on-site painting there on a previous visit.
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| Photo by Pat Clark
I was very pleased and honored last night when my painting Belhaven Rooftops, Glasgow was given an Honorable Mention Award at the Chicago Alliance of Visual Artists exhibition ARCHITECTURAL ELEMENTS at the Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th Street in Chicago. The show will be up through January 30, 2018. Gallery hours are 8am to 6pm Monday through Saturday and 8am to noon Sunday. You can see a better picture of this painting from my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series if you scroll down a few posts.
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