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.        

  

       

THE ART INSTITUTE'S 77th EXHIBITION BY ARTISTS OF CHICAGO AND VICINITY: WORKS ON PAPER

A black-and-white photo of the 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting Indiana Cropduster by George C. Clark
as it appeared in the exhibition catalog.
(Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Image copyright 1978 George C. Clark.)

In the previous post I told how I came to paint Indiana Cropduster and submit it to the jury for the Chicago and Vicinity show.  I'll continue the story...

Competition was fierce for the Art Institute's semi-annual Chicago and Vicinity shows.  Over 1500 entries were winnowed down to fewer than a hundred selected by the jury.  I was delighted to get a letter announcing that my painting had been selected and a loan agreement contract for the exhibition.  (Here is a sidelight I found interesting about the loan agreement.  Art that is handmade by an artist is insured for its sale price while at the museum, but art that is thought up by an artist and then fabricated by a foundry or cabinetmaker is only insured for the cost of the materials and labor to fabricate a new replacement.)

As the exhibition neared I was even more thrilled to receive a phone call from Esther Sparks, curator of the exhibition and one of its three jurors, who told me she hoped I would be at the opening reception because my painting had been chosen for a major award.  Later she called again to tell me that my award was the Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company Purchase Award, and that the giant international accounting firm was buying Indiana Cropduster to hang in their Chicago corporate headquarters.  (This firm has since changed its name to KPMG.)  Apparently the jurors select the prizewinners, then sponsors are allowed to purchase prizewinners and have their names on the awards.  This was a huge break for a young unknown artist, to be exhibited in a world class art museum, to win a major award, and to have my work purchased for a prestigious corporate art collection!

But it got even better.  At the opening reception I met Esther Sparks and mentioned to her that I had been showing work at the Art Institute's Art Rental and Sales Gallery for almost four years.  She said that she was the curatorial advisor to the Women's Board of the Art Institute, the volunteer organization that ran the Art Rental and Sales Gallery in the lower level of the museum (where the photography galleries are today) to raise funds for the museum and to promote Chicago artists.  She said they were starting a new program of using part of their space for a series of two-month exhibitions featuring two artists each time drawn from their regular roster of exhibitors.  They were planning to pair a maker of wall-hung art with a sculptor for each exhibition, and did I want to do an exhibition of large landscapes there?  Did I ever!  Indiana Cropduster was the only really big landscape I had done at that point, but I had some time to work on the project and I got busy right away.

I got some more big sheets of heavy hand-made Japanese toyoshi paper.  With their rough deckle edges trimmed, they gave me a working area of 40 x 70 inches, big enough to be impressive but a lot easier to mount and frame than Indiana Cropduster.  I did two vertical paintings, one a night scene of a cement elevator on the waterfront in Waukegan looming over an empty parking lot that I called Mathon's Parking Lot, and one of the empty space downtown next to the Chicago River surrounded by high-rises where the city kept a big glistening mountain of blue-tinted salt for use on icy winter streets titled Where Salt Comes From.  I will show you both of those paintings in future posts.  The third painting I finished in that series was a horizontal landscape of the farm in Delphi, this one showing my wife's uncle in his tractor discing a field of corn stubble with her grandfather's old yellow house visible on the horizon.  I called that one Fall Plowing.

The Chicago and Vicinity show ran for several months in the fall and winter of 1978-9.  Toward the end of its run I got a call from the Art Institute putting me in touch with collectors interested in my work.  It was a young lawyer and his wife from Glencoe.  They told me they liked Indiana Cropduster so much they would have bought it if it hadn't already been sold, and asked if I had any more big landscapes.  I invited them to my home/studio to see the three new unframed paintings I had finished at that point.  They purchased Fall Plowing.          

I regret I don't have a decent photograph of Fall Plowing, but the only slides I had were ones I shot inside the Electric Cycle studio where the lighting was really bad and they were spoiled by visible glare.  Speaking of photos, the black-and-white picture at the top of this post was shot by the Art Institute's photographer for use in the exhibition catalog.  It was shot through the plexiglas without any reflections or glare.  That's the work of a real pro.  And, unlike the color photo in my previous post, it is in sharp focus.