AGELESS NORTH SHORE » Art Opening & Exhibits

Outsider Artists? In the Burbs?

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:29:12 +0000

Harold Jeffries “People Are Smiling When
They Have Their Masks On,” acrylic,
ballpoint pen, colored pencil, collage

Wayne Mazurek “New 2000 Camry LS Sedan,”
archival print on canvas

Luke Tauber “Clara’s House – Market Square,
Leipzig circa 1830,” watercolor, ink on paper

(from Art Off the Grid)
11.26.11 NOW SHOWING (until 12/17) at The Art Center in Highland Park, IL:

SHARE MY KINGDOM: Featuring work from Harold Jefferies, Wayne Mazurek, and Luke Tauber, three artists from Little City’s Center for the Arts, a studio collective for artists with developmental disabilities, part of the larger Little City Foundation in Palatine, IL.

There were only brief biographies of the artists on hand the day I visited the gallery, but their work clearly expresses the artists’ interests: Wayne Mazurek is a car afficionado, Luke Tauber works with images from the lives of composers like Bach and Handel and Harold Jeffries work is peopled by visions of humanity with philosophical titles like “People Are Smiling When They Have Their Masks On.”

Most of the pieces are done with marker, colored pencils, watercolor, ink and graphite on paper and bring to mind work that falls into the category of “outsider” art. Work from each of the artists was digitally reproduced on large canvases – visually striking as part of an art exhibit, but it seemed to take a step away from the original work; maybe it just feels too far from the artists’ handmade visions, and yes, I am assuming this was done by someone other than the artists.

Also at the Art Center: 12×12
This is a national juried exhibit of small works with some interesting pieces, including a lovely bronze foot (what else?) from Mary Seyfarth, that wonderful ceramic artist and sculptor who lives down the street from me and often has a parade of ceramic foot sculptures on the walk leading to her front door, which never fails to make me happy when I walk by…

Mary Seyfarth, “Moon Step,” bronze and marble

“Members Only” Show at David Gista’s ART SCHOOL Gallery in Glencoe

Peggy — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:32:52 +0000

Twenty-nine painters (plus one printmaker) who are students of French painter David Gista gathered at the Art School and Gallery in Glencoe for the opening reception of Members Only: The Art School Students’ Show last Friday evening, August 14. The exhibit will remain up at the gallery through September 18. The Art School is across the street from the Writer’s Theatre, at 348 Tudor Court, Glencoe (call 847-242-0104 for more information about upcoming exhibits and fall class offerings.)

A visitor to The Art School & Gallery contemplates the images on the wall

The exhibiting artists represent an eclectic group of dedicated amateur and professional artists who have come together under Gista’s knowledgeable, energetic and expert tutelage. Gista is a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and exchange programs with Parson School of Paris and the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, has had numerous exhibits in the US and Europe and is currently represented by Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris and Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

Participating artists include: Sheri Ross, Pat Hinkel, Susan Dienhart, Andie Ade, Gerry O’ Malley, Elena Crumbaugh, Roda K, Angie Ade, Susan Schwartz, Janet Lewis, Aparna Krishen, Kate Sullivan, Nancy Bauer, Loren Harris-Heller, Collette Zeman, Barbara Roseman, S. Bennet, Linda Newcomer, Chandrika Marla, Aviva Ginzburg, Ragini Ramesh, Brigitte Wolf, Cindee Dietz, Jack Makuch, Sally Haglund, Scott Kiefer, Chris Porter, Nina Vanderpoel and Peggy Shearn.

Portraits by various artists at The Art School & Gallery 's "Members Only" show

Matisse being Matisse: The Exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute

Peggy — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Today’s post is written by Don Shearn

I just wanted to clarify that I am not the visual artist/painter at Ageless North Shore. So my opinion about the Matisse exhibit is purely from the entertainment angle.

Bathers by a River, March 1909–10, May–November 1913, and summer 1916–17

To wit, is it worth it to spend $18.00 ($12.00 if you’re over 65, a student or a child) at Chicago’s Art Institute to see the 120 paintings, prints, drawings, and prints that Henri Matisse created between 1913 and 1917?

Let’s start with what I knew about Henri Matisse. Next to nothing. Matisse was the cutout guy. The guy who cut out colored paper and stuck them on paper or canvas or boards. And then years after Matisse died (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954), Museum Stores sold reproductions of Matisse cutouts on note cards.

Set of Matisse Cutout Notecards ($12.95 from SFMOMA)

It turns out that Matisse did not start the cutouts until 1941 after being diagnosed with cancer and following surgery. Matisse called his last fourteen years, “Une seconde vie”, a second life.

Matisse had been making a pretty good living since 1910 primarily through his association with the Russian textile merchant and art collector Sergei Shchukin. Shchukin used the paintings by Matisse to “decorate” his mansion in Moscow.

Shchukin drawing by Henri Matisse

Shchukin also collected Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. He had an eye for the avante garde. Unfortunately for Shchukin so did the Russian Revolution whose government in 1917 appropriated his collection, while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died in 1936.

The exhibit follows Matisse in his mid-forties as he works to find new forms of expression. Matisse feels the artistic heat from Pablo Picasso as the leader of the artistic pack in Paris. In addition, the exhibit shows the influence of WWI on Matisse and his work. Although forty four at the time of the war, Matisse volunteered but was turned down due to health reasons.

Within a few weeks in August 1914, France was mobilized, the artist’s childhood in Bohain-en-Vermandois in the north was occupied and his house in Issy (a suburb of Paris) was requisitioned by the French military.

Matisse did a series of prints entitled Civil Prisoners of Bohain-en-Vermandois. These prints of residents of the occupied Northern French city were sold to assist those displaced by WW I. The prints are part of the exhibit.

I strongly recommend renting the audio guide. This gives you a sense of connection with the paintings and the thinking of the curators. For those few Ageless readers who are not totally conversant with Matisse, post-impressionism, print-making and sculpture, the audio guide fills in some important gaps.

Goldfish and Palette 1914-1915

Rachel Wolff wrote about this exhibit in the Daily Beast. Here is what she says,

There are few delicate floral arrangements, bright interiors, and lush color palettes for which the early modernist is so typically known. Instead, we see backgrounds invading foregrounds, abstracted objects, vast color fields, Cubist portraits, skewed perspectives, lots of black, lots of gray, and the painter himself letting his freak flag fly….

I, for one, love when museums showcase a crowd-pleasing artist’s darker, stranger, and uglier side (visually speaking, of course).

Click here for the full review on Daily Beast

My conclusion.

This is a pretty esoteric exhibit to my mind. It is a study of the artistic process and a narrow slice of Matisse’s work. It is fascinating to trace a subject like “The Bathers” through sketch, painting, sculpture and print.

And since we are members of the Art Institute, not only was the exhibit free…so was the coffee in the member’s lounge.

French Painter David Gista Opens “The Art School” in Glencoe

Peggy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:47:34 +0000

David Gista

The highly-regarded French artist David Gista has opened The Art School and “Gallery G” at 348 Tudor Ct. in Glencoe – an attractive storefront space across the street from Writers’ Theatre in downtown Glencoe. One room is devoted to the Gallery G exhibition space and the other serves as a classroom for the art instruction now being offered by Gista’s Art School.

We visited Saturday, February 13, for the closing party (think wine, Chinese food to celebrate the Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day sweets!) of Susan Cua’s show “Je t’aime Paris.”

pastel painting by Susan Cua

As you might guess from the name, this collection of Cua’s work consists of images from the city of Paris, oil pastel paintings executed in Cua’s expressionistic hand. Cua was on hand to tell us about her other career as a classically-trained musician and her passion for world travel.

The next show in Gallery G will feature etchings by Scott Kieffer and watercolors by Barbara Roseman, with an opening reception February 20, from 4-8pm.

The Art School

The Art School is offering a variety of art classes for adults, teens and kids with an unusual flexible class pass for adult classes; instructors include Gista himself and Italian architect and artist Carlo Locascio. Gista plans to use the gallery as a venue to promote the work of advanced students, as well as juried and guest artist shows throughout the year.

"Gallery G" in Glencoe

David Gista is a graduate of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (yes, THAT Beaux-Arts), who was “discovered” in 1995 by the internationally recognized Darthea Speyer Gallery in Paris, who also represents the late Ed Paschke and Leon Golub. Gista’s first visit to Chicago was in 1996 when he met Gary Marks, and in 1997 Gista held his first one-man show in the United States at the Gary Marks Gallery. Gista also participated in a group exposition at Chicago’s Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, as well as exhibiting work in Hamburg, Germany and in France.

Through the Darthea Speyer Gallery connection, Gista was invited by the late Ed Pashke to serve as a guest speaker/lecturer at Northwestern University. Since then he was one of twelve featured artists as part of Chicago Artist’s Month and had solo exhibitions at The University Club of Chicago as well as The Union League Club of Chicago, and The Art Center in Highland Park. You may also have seen his work published locally in East on Central.

Carlo Locascio holds a Masters degree in Architecture from the University of Architecture, Palermo Italy; Fine Art Teaching Degree, Istituto Pubblica Istruzione, Rome, Degree in Fine Art, Academy of Art, Palermo. He is an award winning architect, designer and figurative painter who creates multi-media work, saying “My inspiration is the unending need to give expression to the abstract meanings hidden in everyday life, as informed by my personal memories and dreams.” (Chicago Sun Times, Oct. 2008)

You can drop by the gallery in person, visit them on Facebook, at their website or give them a call: 847-242-0104.

Hangin’ with Bloomsbury Group at the Block Museum

Peggy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:00:07 +0000

portrait of Leonard Woolf by Roger Fry

The Block Museum in Evanston currently has an exhibit of work by the Bloomsbury Group, a loose association of friends, colleagues and lovers that included among others, the writer Virginia Woolf (once portrayed by Nicole Kidman wearing a prosthetic nose in the movie The Hours, but perhaps better know as the author of Mrs. Dalloway) and her sister, the painter Venessa Bell, art critic Clive Bell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Roger Fry, writer E.M. Forster and historian Lytton Strachey... and other interesting folks. The exhibit is free, and runs through March 14.

The cultural impact this group had on the art, literature, decorative arts and in Keynes’ case, economic theory, of the first half of the 20th Century in the English-speaking world and beyond, is hugely significant in retrospect. In their own times, the various members of this community were thought to be highly controversial. None of the Bloomsbury men served in WWI, choosing to be Conscientious Objectors instead. Many in the group had what were unconventional lifestyles for their times. (That means they were gay and/or slept around and often did not have regular jobs and sometimes wore funny clothes. )

In 1910 Roger Fry organized an exhibit called Manet and the Post-Impressionists (a term he coined), featuring work of Gaugin, Manet, Matisse, and Van Gogh in England, bringing their art to the public’s attention. The public was not universally appreciative; some of their reactions are in one of several video installations that are part of the Bloomsbury Group exhibit.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and her husband biographer and essayist Leonard Woolf created a small press in their dining room, an enterprise that eventually evolved into a commercial venture, but not before they’d hand-published works by various members of their circle, as well as works by Sigmund Freud, Christopher Isherwood, and the first UK book edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1924.

Roger Fry founded a decorative arts artists’ cooperative called the Omega Workshop; Vanessa Bell and friends painted decorative designs onto the walls, windows, and furniture of the Charleston Farmhouse where she and Virginia and others lived for a time before WWI; and of course, Virginia Woolf wrote brilliant novels that have become part of our literary canon.

"sitting room" at the Omega Workshop

The Block Museum has a whole slew of films and lectures about various characters and aspects of this remarkable group; you might want to combine a visit to the exhibit with a viewing of the documentary The War Within: A Portrait of Virginia Woolf, Saturday, January 30, 2 pm, or attend a gallery talk and exhibit tour at 6pm on March 11. There are also lectures, family workshops, Merchant-Ivory movies and more. Check out the full listings here.