Winding Down

Tags

Art, Gallery, painting

I got a message from Franco asking me for advice.

When Franco was my student he would tell me how his parents already had his future planned for him. They knew there would always be jobs in health care so that was what he would study. It didn’t matter that Franco was good at art and loved it. I see this sort of thing a lot. In most cases the child will follow their parents plan but at some point they will abandon it, having wasted a lot of time and money, and return to art. Or, they follow the plan and always wonder what they would have made of themselves had they followed their own dreams.
Franco is a good artist and a good communicator; I told him I thought he’d make a great teacher. Then he expressed interest in my #SummerOfArt14 project so I came up with a plan to meet in the gallery district and wander around. I posted the event on my page and my friend, Jean, joined us.

There was a downpour of rain for an hour at our meeting time. Franco was an hour late (and Jean teased him about that throughout our walk) so Jean and I caught up while sipping coffee inside and sheltered from the rain.
We walked through many galleries but all agreed that nothing we saw was really very moving. I really liked a couple paintings we saw by Valery Koshlyakov. They seem like quick travel sketches recreated on enormous stretched canvas in washes of cream, white and gray.

However, what I enjoyed most was having the owner of Ann Nathan Gallery walk us around and tell us about what was being shown in her space. She really took interest in Franco and let him pick up one of the kinetic sculptures she had that was carved from one trunk of wood.

I was really inspired by this woman. She didn’t have to walk around with us, we don’t look like buyers and she wasn’t going to make a sale on us but it didn’t matter. She just wanted to share with us what she loves.

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Hodag

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Art, Gallery, Hodag, Jackelope, Wisconsin

While vacationing at my family’s summer cabin in the North woods, Wisconsin, there isn’t a great variety of art galleries to visit. About ten years ago one opened up in our little town of Lake Tomahawk. I was pretty surprised and excited when I spotted a giant metal sculpture outside of the gallery. The sculpture is an abstract bending skeletal fish and indicates more modernity than what you will find inside.
The gallery is owned and operated by artist, Rob Umlauf. Umlauf is a soft spoken man who will be happy to talk to you about his work or that of the other artists work in his showroom. The work is characteristic of what you will find in most art galleries Up North, and is probably what most people there are looking for. Umlauf paints fish, turtles and mythical sea creatures like mermaids.
My favorite piece in the gallery is a portrait of a Hodag. In 1893 a Rhinelander, Wisconsin resident, land surveyor and prankster, Eugene Shepard alerted the media to his capture of this giant beast that required dynamite to be killed.

The story grew to gain national attention and when experts from The Smithsonian began an investigation Shepard came clean about staging the whole thing. The legend of the Hodag, though, lives on and it’s imagined likeness can be found on T Shirts and other souvenirs. Umlauf’s depiction is almost exactly like the giant statue of the beast that sits outside Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce.

The Hodag is not North America’sonly mythical creature. Perhaps you’ve also heard of the jackelope?

Skokie Sculpture Walk

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Art, Chicago, conversation, free art, freinds, path, public art, Sculpture, walk

There’s a two mile grassy strip that sits between McCormick Boulevard and the Northshore Channel about a 40 minute drive from downtown Chicago in Skokie, Illinois. Walk along it on an early morning and you can see some people rowing in the channel but at any time of day you can stroll, run or walk along the paved pathways. Speckled along the path are a number of fantastic sculptures for you to stop and admire.

I met my friend, Mandy, here on a Monday morning for a long and sunny walk. It was perfect for us because we go long lengths of time between catching up and the walk creates the perfect setting for that. If you are a teacher, like myself, you may consider the park a place to take students for a couple hours of sketching or inspiration for their own 3D piece.

Or maybe you just need a cool backdrop for some awesome selfies.
Skokie Sculpture Walk

Painted postcards

Tags

Art, beach, Greece, painting, postcards, watercolor

I was at my mom’s house yesterday and saw the postcard I sent her on her fridge. While in Greece I painted the postcards I would send back home. It made me feel less like a bum at the beach since I did more than just sleep there and I was being creative and true to my promise if dedicating the season to art.
My mom and my friend, Anne, have both framed cards I’ve sent to them. We love postcards because of the pictures. We love them because we are receiving a piece of someone else’s trip. When I send a card I try to limit what I write and I think about which image suits the person on the other end the best. “Mom will like the columns, the kids will like the beach scene.”
We are thousands of miles away and still we are thinking of the people back home and we want them to know it.
Consider this the next time you travel and stop at a postcard stand. Might your loved ones more enjoy something made of your hand? (That sounds like something someone else would write.)
I don’t know, collage on to a torn up map, make a sketch, send piece of a playbill. Or just pick up a postcard at a stand. Who doesn’t love a postcard?

Building The Dream

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Art, Chicago, Gallery, Gus Russo, organized crime, painting, The outfit, underworld, xenz

Did you know that prior to the Chicago fire many of the city’s buildings were sinking? So, to save them, the buildings were jacked up and placed on beams which, in turn, created a series of alleys and tunnels below the city. These tunnels created the perfect atmosphere for the creation of organized crime. No photographs of the tunnels remain and very few drawings of it can be found. But when a London based artist, Xenz, learned of the tunnels while reading “The Outfit,” by Gus Russo, he created a series of drawings and paintings inspired by the fact based story of Chicago before the fire for his show at Vertical Gallery. Xenz even built a 3-D mulit-layered model of what he imagined art of the city to have looked at the gallery’s storefront.

Xenz creates images that convey the sense of grime a literal underworld would contain as well as characters who might be milling around down there. He layers washes of umber, sepia, cream and gray to lure us into his compositions and make us feel as though we are entering a tunnel into the world below the tall buildings. Above, we see faint suggestions of structures of familiar modern skyscrapers that allude to the title of the exhibit, “Building The Dream.”

The drawings and paintings are now my favorite of what I’ve seen this summer and I want my book club to read “The Outfit.” Someone please buy me one of these paintings, they are compellingly gorgeous.

Vertical Gallery
xenz

Teenagers…sigh

Tags

Art, art institute of chicago, Chicago, Magritte, museum, teenagers

I scheduled a meet up at the Art Institute with my most recently graduated AP Studio kids. Here’s what I learned about them as graduates:
1. It’s summertime, so only half the kids who say they will be there will actually show up.
2. The kids that do show up will be late, 15-60 mins late.
3. There will be no apologies for being late, just like in school. In fact, they will act as though you should be grateful that they are there at all.
4. They are there more for the experience of being downtown than they are for the artwork.
5. They will enjoy the gift shop more than the exhibit.
6. They will be very polite in the museum and behave appropriately.
7. They will stand to pose for only one selfie, then they are done and ready to catch the red line to china town for a bubble tea.

Overheard at the exhibit:
“This reminds me of Dalí for some reason.”
“It’s like… He’s making fun of art.”
“I could totally paint that one on the top left.”

We also observed that Magritte was way ahead of his time, fashion wise. He thought of barefoot shoes before they ever materialized, he envisioned the Brazilian wax and he painted wood grain tattoos on women (that one has yet to catch on but in sure we will see it in twenty years or so).

Magritte At The Art Institute of Chicago

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Art, Chicago, Exhibits, Magritte, Museums, painting, Surreal, Surrealism

Lynne works at the same school I do and two years ago we were at a conference with a group of other teachers from our district. Most of the others were much younger than us so we found ourselves socializing at different locations than the others and we really hit it off. Since then we’ve been saying “we need to get together again” but we haven’t. We arrive to school around the same time each morning so the extent of our social time is limited to the five minutes we each have before we need to prep for the day.

So, I was really pleased when one morning, last week, I got a text from her asking if I was available the next day to meet her downtown. It was a beautiful Friday afternoon and being downtown on these days sometimes makes me feel like a tourist in my own city. We met at the Monroe street entrance so we could head to the Education Center and renew our free passes. Lynne wasn’t familiar with Rene Magritte but she was all for paying more for a ticket to get in to see the show.

Magritte was a surrealist and probably one of the more creepy ones. Surrealists were influenced by the ideas and theories of Sigmund Freud and the artists tried to tap into the subconscious to create their work. Magritte repeats the use of several images; one being emotionless men in dark suits and bowler hats. Most of the figures in his work seem to be devoid of emotion and identity. The colors are all very dull and the painting technique very precise. The gallery the show was exhibited in was very dimly lit. I’m not sure if that was done to decrease damage to the colors of the paint but, if so, it also made the experience that much more surreal. It also kinda made me sleepy, I yawned through the whole gallery.

Photos inside the exhibit were not allowed but I was happy to see in person many works I’ve only studied in books along with so many others that I’d never seen before. Lynne remarked, “this would be a cool project for your students,” when she saw a piece that used words in it. I repilied, “it would be a cool project for your kids too!” Later, I saw her jotting ideas down in a notebook.

Like my other non-artist freinds, Lynne was ready to leave before I was and I was certainly hungry, so we left to get some lunch and live the tourist life for a couple hours. We went to Park Grill at Millennium Park and sat at the bar for some lunch and a glass of wine. Days like this I do not take for granted as a teacher.

The Art Institute of Chicago
Millenium Park Grill

Bridgeport Art Center Third Fridays

Tags

Art, Bars, Beer, Chicago, freinds, Gallery, painting

My meet up buddy was again, the vivacious and spunky Miss Vero of Cicero, IL. She had to work until 9:00, on Friday, and the open studio was only until 10:00 but we went anyway, at 10:00. When the doors were closed and locked but we got in when someone else was leaving.
The Center is housed in what was once the Speigel catalog warehouse on 35th in Bridgeport, Chicago. The warehouse also houses a furniture dealer and an event venue which seemed to be hosting a wedding last night. We could see the flashing disco lights on the top floor beckoning us to crash the party.
Instead, we headed up to the third floor and found a couple studios still open and artists welcoming us to have a look. My favorite artist on this floor’s gallery space was Ruth Esserman whose artwork features thousands of identiless people shown from an arial view and looking busy at work though their poses were static. You cannot tell if the forms are male or female, what race they are or what they are wearing. They are assembled about in a way that reminded me of ants working together around their hill. There is no joy or drama just a sense of a task being handled through silent communication. The large paintings were my favorite because I was able to stand in front of them finding new things within for a while. It looked like colors were laid down then she put a white wash over them, removed areas where she wanted the figures, painted the figures and even used what looked like pencil for their shadows.

After the show, Vero and I headed over to Maria’s Packaged Goods for a drink. The beer menu at this place had us deliberating over what to order for at least ten minutes. Then, as is typical of time with Vero, we spent the next three hours involved in a great conversation. She gave me some tips on how to improve my blog and critiqued my refrigerator and pantry contents (Vero was my house sitter while I was in Greece). I learned, finally, what a Michelada is and why there was some leftover Clamato on a shelf in my fridge. Vero is a good example of benefits of teaching beyond summers off. Kids grow up and become adults and the ones you really connected with while they were in school can become your friends as adults. Friends that are great additions to your life and who have things to teach you.

Bridgeport Art Center

Maria’s Packaged Goods

Ruth Esserman

Art Institute Book Club Meeting

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Art, Book club, Chicago, Forgery, freinds, museum, The Art Institute Of Chicago

When we read a book we like to meet places that are somehow related to the book. When we read Loving Frank, for example, we decided to meet at Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park. For Caveat Emptor we decided to hit The Art Institute Of Chicago and see if we could find some of the artists Perenyi forged.

Twenty four hours before we met I tweeted @perenyi_ken to let home know what we were up to in hopes that he would tweet back. He did not. Sigh. But that means now I can talk shit about his forging because he probably won’t check out the tweet I compose about this blog.

With the Art Institute’s map and App in our hands we first headed to The Early American Art gallery and found a Peto, a couple Heades, and a Sargent.

Here we are in front of a Heade.

Rachel and I had both downloaded the book on our devices and didn’t find the examples of Perenyi’s work until we finished the book because they are at the end. “If I knew that’s what he was describing while I was reading I wouldn’t have been so impressed,”remarked Rachel. I agreed. Many well known Early American artists and works sought out by collectors (who pay high prices) really aren’t that good if you are expecting super realism or quality comparable to Winslow Homer. I think the reason Perenyi, who is a self taught artist, was able to replicate works so well was for two reasons: 1. He was a genius about using authentic materials and making new paint look old. Much of his labor went into creating authentically old looking paintings. 2. As a beginner painter he knew he had to choose artists whose abilities matched his.

I kind of wanted to walk around more and point out my favorite European artists and explain why they were important. But when I had to talk Dora and Rachel into seeing the Magritte exhibit and they finished it in ten minutes (it took me an hour to get through it) that was my first clue that they were reaching their end. Dora kept texting and looking at her phone, they seemed unimpressed by my pointing out the beauty of the architecture in the museum, and I’m sure Rachel’s feet under her very pregnant belly were killing her. I had to realize my friends were just not as into it as I am and get the out of there. So, we wrapped things up and found a place to feed us salad.

The Art Institute of Chicago

Caveat Emptor

Tags

Art, art forgery, books, paint, painting

My book club decided on Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi, a memoir about his life as an art forger, before I came up with the idea of dedicating my summer to art. The book is interesting, entertaining, educational and a bit humorous as well as surprising.

Perenyi was a kid without any idea of what he wanted to do with his life when he met a group of people in the New York City art scene just after he graduated high school. The young adults introduced him to the art scene and included him in their parties and social circle during the late 1960’s. As someone who always hated school but was good with his hands Ken fit right in and was encouraged to create. He became interested in antique furniture and old paintings and the process of restoring them which led to a realization that he could create paintings that looked like pieces art collectors would pay top money for. In the beginning Perenyi thought the skill to be a temporary way of earning money in order to fund his own art but it became his life career.

The book is filled with an array of characters you’d imagine a person coming into contact with through such a line of work. Perenyi becomes friends with fashion models, mobsters, cleptomaniacs, drug addicts, lawyers, thieves, art restorers and wealthy collectors. We are taken through Pernyi’s young adulthood into present times and see how his career develops and how he adapts to challenges. What interested me most was reading about how he was able to simulate the cracking of old paint and the aging of varnish. He hunted for old panels and canvases to paint on to make his the materials authentic and he learned a lot by working in art restoration.

Perenyi’s writing style is simple, his art is in painting, after all; but the book is interesting at the very least. I have always said that if I could do any other career it would be in art restoration and the book has me thinking about that path again. I completed it as I ended my trip to Greece, which seemed very appropriate.