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.
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| Sailing School Dock, Wilmette Harbor, 16 x 12 inch watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD Wilmette is a suburb north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. |
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| The Last Tomato in Pat's Garden, 12 x 16 inch watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD
Whenever I do a a "Traveler's Sketchbook" exhibition like the recent one at Beverly Arts Center I describe the subjects as "ranging from the artist's own Chicago backyard to the back roads of Europe." Here is a painting from my back yard. I painted it late in the season when the climbing beans had gone crazy and there was a single tomato still ripening. I asked my wife to leave some of her tools out so that they could be in the picture.
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| Bass Boat, Rend Lake, Illinois, 8 x 17.5 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark AVAILABLE |
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| The Forester's House, 16 x 12 inch oil on canvas by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
My problem with the natural summer foliage of the American Midwest where I live is that it is all pretty much the same green color-- the trees, the grasses and the shrubbery. That's why most of my Midwestern landscapes feature prominently big areas of other color like buildings, plowed fields, bodies of water, roads, or railway tracks against which the foliage can act as counterpoint. The Forester's House is a rare example where I have let the foliage take center stage because I really like the shift in color and texture that the blue spruce trees at the heart of the painting make with both the deciduous forest in the background and the shrubs and day lilies in the foreground. I like the rustic house in the forest too that gives the painting its title. This was painted on-site in a public park in Schaumburg, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago.
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| 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.
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| Backyards, Chicago, 15 x 20 inch watercolor by George C. Clark AVAILABLE |
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| Mathon's Parking Lot, 70 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark Collection of the Sandoz/Novarty Corporation of Switzerland
In the previous post I described what happened at the opening reception for the Art Institute of Chicago's 77th Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity: Works on Paper. When my wife Pat and I left that event we were ecstatic and very hungry. We decided to celebrate by having supper at one of our then-favorite restaurants, Mathon's in Waukegan. Mathon specialized in seafood, and I believe he was the only Chicago-area restauranteur who still had a commercial fishing license for Lake Michigan. We drove up Lake Shore Drive and Sheridan Road to Waukegan, arriving late but still in time to enjoy an excellent meal. We were among the last diners to leave, and when we went out to the empty parking lot I was struck by the visual quality of the way a giant cement elevator across the street on the waterfront loomed over us against the night sky. I thought the scene might make a good large-scale painting, and I went back a couple of weeks later on a Sunday afternoon and shot reference photos in daylight. I used the photos to get the details right, but I painted the scene as it had looked at night. I imagined myself 50 feet up in the air so that I was looking down at the herringbone pattern of the parking lot, but up at the cement elevator.
Mathon's Parking Lot was one of six new large landscapes I painted for the Art Rental and Sales Gallery exhibition that featured my work and that of sculptor Joe Burlini, although only five of them made it into the show because I sold one of them out of my studio as I described in the previous post. The gallery borrowed Indiana Cropduster from its new owner to fill out the exhibition, and we also showed some of my smaller landscapes and some of the on-site watercolors from my Traveler's Sketchbook series. None of my really big paintings sold at the exhibition, but several of the smaller ones did. The previous show in the same space had featured the work of one of my teachers at the School of the Art Institute, and I was pleased to note that my work outsold his both in quantity and dollar value (a petty observation, I know).
Mathon's Parking Lot was in a number of other exhibitions, and it won a prize at one of the Baer Competition exhibitions at Beverly Art Center. About ten years after I painted it, Sandoz Crop Protection Corporation, the American subsidiary of Switzerland's chemical giant Sandoz, built a new corporate headquarters in DesPlaines, Illinois, and were looking for art with an agricultural theme. An agent showed them my work and they purchased two paintings, including Mathon's Parking Lot. Years later Sandoz, now called Sandoz/Novarty, relocated its American operation back to Europe. I've been told the art collection is now in Denmark.
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| October Coneflowers, 16 x 12 inch signed print by George C. Clark AVAILABLE |
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| October Coneflowers, 40 x 30 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark AVAILABLE
When I do an exhibition of my travel art I usually mention in the press release that "subjects range from the back roads of Europe to the artist's own Chicago back yard." Here is one of those subjects I found in my back yard. One October a few years ago I was struck by the graphic qualities of a browning, wilted coneflower plant drying out next to my garage. I put a big piece of light-colored cardboard between the plant and the dark brown wall of the garage and made a 20 x 16 inch ink and watercolor painting of it, which I promptly sold to a collector in Evanston. I liked the image so much that I photographed my painting and adapted the digital image to create the 16 x 12 inch open edition signed print shown above. (The print shown isn't signed yet-- I sign them in pencil just above the copyright notice at the lower left.)
Occasionally I find a subject so interesting I do more than one version of it, and this is such a case. Using my first painting as a guide, I made a much bigger black-and-white ink drawing with a fat calligraphy pen on a 40 x 30 inch sheet of heavy watercolor board. In doing so, I made a few subtle changes to the composition. I think of it as an study in spidery linearity.
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| Waterfall in Chicago Botanic Garden, 16 x 12 inch watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD I painted this waterfall on a summer day at the Chicago Botanic Garden, which is located in one of the lakeshore suburbs north of the city. |
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| Garden Gate, Lake Forest, Illinois, 28 x 22 inch oil, pencil, and pastel on paper painting by George C. Clark AVAILABLE I rarely use pastel, but here I think it worked well describing the texture of the foliage on the topiary bushes and the trees in the distance. |
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| Dog Beach, Wilmette, Illinois, 10 x 14 inch watercolor by George C. Clark SOLD Wilmette, one of Chicago's North Shore suburbs, has a beach for dogs in its Gilson Park on a peninsula between Lake Michigan and the channel leading to its harbor. Masts of sailboats in the harbor are visible in the background at the right. |
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| Fox Valley Pansies, 10 x 8 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark AVAILABLE |
