Flemish Puppet PAGLIACCI

Flemish Puppet "Pagliacci," 15 x 10 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I found this marionette spotlit in a glass display case in the Folk Art Museum in Ghent, Belgium, and recorded him in my sketchbook.  Later, back home, I found a photo in a book of Enrico Caruso wearing the exact same costume and realized the puppet was Canio from the opera Pagliacci.  I redid my sketch in ink and watercolor and added the knife and the fallen body of Canio's faithless wife Nedda to recreate the final scene of the opera.

"La Commedia e' finita!" 

DINOSAUR AT THE BUFFET

Dinosaur at the Buffet, 10 x 6.5 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark

The last three lengthy posts have been about art that I created over thirty years ago.  Let's look at something more recent.  Last Tuesday I was invited by friends to Members' Night at the Field Museum (Chicago's natural history museum).  I had a chance to see the new "Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence" exhibit and to do some sketching in the collection.  The evening included a very nice catered buffet supper served in the museum's big central Stanley Field Hall.  Coffee was dispensed under Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as I recorded above in my sketchbook.    

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.       

    

      

NEW TRAVELER'S SKETCHBOOK EXHIBITION IN CHICAGO

Backyards, Chicago, 15 x 20 inch watercolor by George C. Clark    Available

Eight of the paintings from my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series along with two large studio landscapes are currently on exhibit at Alderman John Arena's 45th Ward Office Gallery at 4754 North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.  The Ward Office is open Monday through Friday from 8:00am to 6:00pm, and the exhibition will run through April, 2013.

SAN MOISE, VENICE

San Moise, Venice, 29 x 23 oil on paper painting by George C. Clark    SOLD

I had to cross this bridge and walk through the little campo in front of the Church of San Moise to get to San Marco from the hotel I was staying at in Venice.