ANCIENT GATE IN AACHEN, GERMANY

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.   

CAMPO SANTA MARIA FORMOSA, VENICE

Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, 29 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper by George C. Clark    SOLD

This is a big oil and pencil on paper studio painting I made after a visit to Venice.  I sold it to a collector in Lake Bluff from an exhibition I had in Lake Forest in the 1980s. In it I depicted my younger self about to cross paths with Corto Maltese as he emerges from beyond the kiosk at the right.  One of the joys of visiting Europe back then was the opportunity to buy great graphic novels by French and Belgian and Italian artists that weren't available in the States.  I discovered artists like Corto's creator Hugo Pratt, Guido Crepax, Jacques Tardi, Jean Giraud aka Moebius, and Milo Manara.  When I was living in Paris in the summer of 1976 I used to get the magazine Charlie Hebdo for the brilliant satiric Paulette comics drawn by Georges Pichard and written by Georges Wolinski who was murdered recently by terrorists.  The Paulette stories were later published in book form and I still have them all in my library.  Now of course, European graphic novels are easily available here in English translation or their original editions from sources on the internet.

"ART SYNTHESIS 2014" EXHIBITION AT INDEPENDENCE LIBRARY IN CHICAGO

Steam (Levee  at St. Louis). 23 x 29 oil and colored pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

My painting Steam (Levee at St. Louis) is currently on exhibit in the ART SYNTHESIS 2014 show at the Independence Branch of the Chicago Public Library located at 3548 W. Irving Park Road in Chicago.  The exhibition will be up through November 29, 2014.  Library hours are Monday and Wednesday from 10am to 6pm, Tuesday and Thursday from noon to 8pm, and Friday and Saturday from 9am to 5pm.

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.

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.

THE OXBOW INN, SAUGATUCK, MICHIGAN

Oxbow Inn, Saugatuck, Michigan, 29 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

Oxbow 1946, photo by Life Magazine photographer Loomis Dean

I painted the Oxbow Inn on-site in the 1980s while attending a week-long workshop at the Summer School of Art there conducted there by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  It is the original structure of the famous art colony, having been constructed in the 19th century to house lumberjacks harvesting Michigan's old-growth forests.  It is now the headquarters of the school with student housing upstairs and gallery and lounge space and the kitchen downstairs.  Meals are eaten on the big verandas that surround part of the building.  There are a number of newer outbuildings that house studios and workspaces for various media, but I found the Inn the most interesting to paint.

The morning I started this painting was overcast, with the sky dark and threatening rain.  Most artists show the front of the building, where a wide veranda faces a lawn leading down to Oxbow Lagoon.  I preferred to paint the side of the building where I could show the white structure with a big dark forested dune looming over it, so I set up by the road where the cars are parked in the photo.  I liked the details in the foreground-- the propane canisters, the garbage cans, and especially the yellow duck whirly-gig.  While I was working, one of the kitchen workers came out to take a break, so I painted her in, too.  This is a case where a painting can be truer than a photograph.  To get a camera back far enough to include this whole facade you would have to tear down a couple of outbuildings and a bunch of trees.  

I found the 1946 photo online.  The truck is parked down by the shore of the Lagoon.  We painted models outdoors too, but mostly in a garden adjacent to the Inn.  The dune in the upper right of the photo is the one in the background of my painting.   

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.        

  

       

MATHON'S PARKING LOT-- A PAINTING FOR MY EXHIBITION AT THE ART RENTAL AND SALES GALLERY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

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.

      

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.

INDIANA CROPDUSTER

Indiana Cropduster, 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
SOLD to KPMG Corporate Collection, Chicago

I don't usually consider Indiana Cropduster to be part of my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series, but since I did travel to research its subject, I'll tell how I came to paint it here.

In 1976 and 1977 I was working a lot in the medium of oil and pencil on paper, both for my figures and landscapes.  Mostly I was working on 23 x 29 inch sheets of Strathmore kid finish bristol drawing paper.  I had been showing and selling landscapes at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.  Usually the gallery didn't want to jury art bigger than 60 inches, but this time they announced a special jurying for wall-hung pieces that were at least 5 x 4 feet, preferably larger.  It seems that one of the city's private social clubs was redecorating their space in a Loop building, and they wanted to buy some big new art.  The gallery gave its artists plenty of warning about this special jurying and I accepted the challenge.

I decided to paint a subject I knew well, the Indiana countryside where my wife Pat's relatives had a big farming operation near Lafayette.  I had painted some of my first landscapes there, as I recounted at the beginning of this blog.  The next time we went there I brought my camera and sketchbook and worked out the composition of this painting.  I decided that what is most characteristic of that part of Indiana is how flat it is and how it has all been gridded up by roads and railroads and almost completely covered by plantings of corn and sometimes soybeans.  I thought of two ways to depict it.  A very wide skinny painting could emphasize the land's flatness, but it wouldn't show the gridding.  I decided instead to use a device I'd seen in the work of two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Paul Hogarth.  I would keep the horizon very high and look down on the land as if I was 50 feet up in a cropdusting airplane.  The painting would be true and would convey more information than any photograph I could take at ground level.  The old Farm Co-op grain elevator stood along the Monon Railroad track just outside the tiny town of Ockley, about a three-quarter mile walk from the home of Pat's aunt and uncle.  The pick-up truck belonged to Pat's cousin.

The biggest heavy archival paper I could find was handmade Japanese toyoshi paper that came in deckle edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  I sliced the deckle off a long side of two sheets and spliced them together using one of the cut off pieces glued across the seam on the paper's back side to secure them.  I then taped my giant sheet to the wall of my studio, a storefront I was sharing with three other artists, and started painting.  

It took me about 3 weeks to finish the painting, although I wasn't working all day everyday on it since I was also working with life models sometimes in the same space.  The hardest part was painting literally thousands of cornstalks leaf by leaf starting at the bottom until they feathered out about two thirds of the way up the painting.  It was worth doing though, because it gave the painting an obsessive quality and was the best way to describe the sheer volume of corn I wanted to depict.

Work presented for this special jurying didn't have to be framed.  I trimmed the painting to 70 x 77 inches and tipped it onto a backing I constructed by overlapping two layers of 40 x 60 inch quarter- inch foamcore sheets that was a few inches larger all around than the painting.  I then wrapped the whole thing in clear acetate for protection, having spliced the acetate with clear tape to get it big enough.

My friend Marilyn Packer knew several artists who were submitting work and she arranged to borrow a bakery truck to deliver the art on a rainy Saturday.  Unfortunately, the back door of the truck was smaller than we expected, and Marilyn's canvas wouldn't fit through it, although the other art did.  She wound up tying her painting to the back of the truck with rope, and I drove right behind the truck with my flashers going because her painting covered the truck's tail lights.  Her painting was a little wet from drizzle by the time we got to the Art Institute loading dock, but it was an oil painting and proved to be undamaged once she dried it off.  We all waited longer than usual for the jury results, and when they came we were all informed that the club had changed its mind and purchased nothing, and all the art would have to be picked up.  The Art Institute was as bummed as the artists were.  I got Indiana Cropduster back and hung it on the wall of my studio.

Flash forward several months, maybe a year...

The Art Institute announced that its big semi-annual juried show, the 77th Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition, will be limited to "Works On Paper" in 1978.  Is this fortuitous or what?  I now needed to frame Indiana Cropduster, and because I knew any professional framer would charge a fortune to do anything that big, I decided to do it myself.  I constructed a stretcher frame an inch larger all around than the painting out of 1 x 6 inch redwood planks.  Then I stretched linen canvas around the redwood and secured it on the back with staples.  I sized the front of the canvas with clear acrylic medium to make the canvas shrink and tauten, and also to glue the fabric to the redwood where they are in contact.  I used nails and glue to fasten lengths of three-quarter inch square wood molding all around the perimeter of the top surface of the stretched canvas.  The visible surfaces of the molding and the adjacent inch of canvas were painted matte black.  Narrow strips of archival acid-free museum board that would be concealed by the painting were tipped around the outer edges of the canvas, and finally the painting was carefully tipped onto the outer edges of the museum board strips with water-soluble glue.  (The purpose of the museum board strips is to enable the painting to be removed from the frame if ever necessary by popping the strips free of the stretcher without putting undo stress on the paper of the painting.)

I wanted to photograph the painting, but there was no way I could get enough even light on a surface that big to do it inside the studio, so we carried it outside and leaned it against the wall of our storefront.  Pat held it to keep the wind from knocking it over while I stepped back into Sheffield Avenue between passing traffic to shoot 35mm slides of it, which is what you see posted above.

I bought a giant sheet of plexiglas to lay across the black molding risers that would keep it from touching the painting's surface.  I had to fabricate my frame stock out of base molding and big quarter-rounds which I stained and varnished myself because I needed it to have a much wider than normal lip that would cover the molding risers you see around the painting in the photograph.  I paid a framer to cut my frame stock to size on their mitre-saw.  I assembled the four frame segments with glue and small nails, and when we lowered the frame over the plexiglas and stretcher, miraculously, everything fit perfectly.  It had taken several days' hard work, but I had kept my out-of-pocket framing expenses to a minimum.  I paid a "Man with a Van" who  advertised in the local underground newspaper $25 to drive me and the painting to the warehouse downtown where the jurying would take place.  I think I'll save what happened next for another post.       

    

      

NARROW-GAUGE LOCOMOTIVE, BOOTHBAY, MAINE

Narrow-gauge Locomotive, Boothbay, Maine,  20 x 30 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark    SOLD

This was an early entry in my "AGE OF IRON" series of railroad images.  I found this little switch engine in a railroad museum in Boothbay, Maine.  This painting was exhibited and sold before I knew I was going to be doing a railroad series.

NIGHT ON THE LEVEE AT ST. LOUIS

Steam (Levee at St. Louis), Oil and colored pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

One night in St. Louis, Missouri, I drove out on the Mississippi River levee where the excursion boats are docked.  The last cruises of the day were over and one of the boats was shutting down its boilers and vented a long stream of white steam against the night sky.  I thought the scene would make a painting and I went back the next day and took photos of the boats and floating dock, but I painted the scene as it had looked at night.  

LOUISIANA BOATYARD

Boatyard, Bayou LaFourche, Louisiana, 18 x 24 oil and pencil on paper by George C. Clark     SOLD

I painted these fishing boats on the same trip that I painted the steamboat Natchez on.  I posted the painting of the Natchez back in April of 2011.

TRAM IN BASEL, SWITZERLAND

Tram in Basel,  23 x 29 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark   PRINT AVAILABLE

I liked the look of the four-wheeled streetcars they had in Basel, but they wouldn't hold still long enough for me to draw them, so I painted this from my photographs.  The bearded passenger with the hat is a self-portrait.  This painting was accepted at one of the juryings for the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago, back in the days when the museum supported and exhibited Chicago artists.  A few months later I was walking down Michigan Avenue and I glanced into the plate glass front of the Michigan Avenue National Bank, and there in the lobby on a big square pillar facing me was Tram in Basel.  The bank kept it for two rental periods, then returned it to the gallery where it was purchased by a private collector.  Unframed 12 x 16 inch prints of this painting are available for $10 at the Museum Store of the Illinois Railway Museum in Union Illinois.

THE FARM IN DELPHI, INDIANA

The White Fence, Delphi, Indiana, 29 x 23 inch oil and pencil on paper by George C. Clark    SOLD

Another painting of the farm in Delphi.

ANOTHER EARLY ON-SITE PAINTING

Steamboat Natchez, New Orleans, 18 x 24 inch oil & pencil on paper painting  by George C. Clark    SOLD

I spent a morning painting this on the bank of the Mississippi.  A couple from California watched me work for a while, then asked if the painting was for sale.  I said it would be, but not until the oil paint had dried and I made some little adjustments in the studio and let the adjustments dry.  I offered to mail them a slide of the finished painting.  I did that and the wife contacted me and bought the painting as a surprise birthday gift for her husband.