Anatomy and Art

Chicago art lovers, the Flat Iron Group’s First Fridays event is featuring Chicago Burner Art, on Friday, April 1st, and on throughout the 16th when there will be a big closing reception.  Yours truly will be featuring six paintings on the walls alongside a number of other talented artists.  I do recommend that you come out and take a look.  Press release details are as follows…

An Exhibition of Art by Chicago Burners
We Burn: Chicago Burning Man Art

WHAT: The closing party features an artists’ reception, live music & video, performance art, and other spontaneous creative fun. A $10 suggested donation at the door goes to BURN NFP.

WHY: Come explore, play, learn, smile, and take home a little Burning Man! We Burn: Chicago Burning Man Art is a multimedia exploration of the impact the Burning Man festival has on Chicago artist-participants.

WHERE: The Flat Iron Arts Building, 1579 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL

WHEN: The show opens as part of Flat Iron First Fridays on April 1, 2011 from 6pm – 10pm. The closing party and artists’ reception is April 16 from 6pm – 10pm.  The show runs from April 1 – 16.

HOW: Through photography, sculpture, video, works on paper, paintings, mixed media, installations, and performances, the community will get a feel for what it means to define oneself as a “burner,” and how the Burning Man principles of radical inclusion, self-expression, civic responsibility, leave no (environmental) trace, radical self-reliance, and active participation are carried over into art works and daily life in Chicago.

This show is made possible with generous support from Bold Urban Renaissance Network.

WHO: We Burn: Chicago Burning Man Art is curated by Elysia Lock and will feature works by
Zac Franzoni
Phillip Solomonson
Marci Rubin
Maria Scileppi
Tim Krueger
Nichelle Lawrence
Gabriel Garcia- Fraire
Jeff Austin
Sara Egner
Michael Schiele
Pat Hilander
Sally Sachs
Elysia Lock
Chiditarod Art Carts
Monster Wheels
Richard Bennett
Ellie Sorokin
April Randall
Lera Gershevich
Leo Spektor
Alexa Razma
Sloan

Don’t forget – Art showing this weekend!

http://www.weburnchicago.com/

Well, I’m doing it again!  It’s time to show some paintings!

This time I’ll be showing with We Burn Chicago!  Local Chicagoans, please do come and check out some fine work from your local burners.

I’ll personally be showing these paintings and more!

Come find us at the Morning Glory Gallery at 571 W. 18th, 1R, Chicago, IL 60616!

We’ll be there Saturday, October 16th and Sunday, October 17th.

Many of you have no doubt followed Vanessa Ruiz’s blog, Street Anatomy yourself.  But just in case you haven’t, please allow me to pass along the information that she has been putting together a show.  If you’re in the Chicago area, you may just want to give it a look.  It gets started in about a week – September 3rd!

Well wow, today was cool.  It had been years since I’d last shown my paintings, but today I got to do just that.  And, I even got to do so from the comfort of my own living room!  Sure, it’s a little weird rearranging your home for an artwalk, but I have to say that overall today was just great.  I loved being able to move art into it’s show space on my own schedule.  I loved being able to keep white wine chilled in the fridge and bring it out throughout the heat of the day today.  I loved getting to know my neighbors.  It wasn’t a big day for sales, mostly people just bought postcards, but I did get some interest in possible future sales, one of which I think will happen in the next week or two.  So that’s really cool.

I used to be very wary of ever selling my work.  Now I love it.  There is nothing more motivating to create more work than the empty space left on your wall from where someone has bought something.  Sure, the capitalism angle can be hard to take, and putting price tags on your pieces can be agonizing, but in the end, after your prices have been decided, when someone says they’ll take something and you know they’re really going to like it, it’s just a really great thing.

And honestly, I just have to say I was very pleased at how much of the living room conversion to a gallery came so naturally.  I think I may have underestimated so many years of showing at the Brewery Artwalk back in LA in group settings.  I guess I didn’t realize just how much I’d learned from those experiences, especially never having been in charge myself.  But I have to say, I felt on top of this.  Part of that was just good synchronicitous timing.  And choosing to only show paintings certainly simplified things over all.  No printing rushes, no last minute framing, all I had to do was move the paintings I wanted to show into the living room, and clear out the things I didn’t want in there for the show.  In the end, there were fifteen of them up on the walls.  Then I moved a curtain to set the space of where I wanted people to be, set up a little table with cards, postcards, snacks and an email sign-up sheet and voila, instant gallery!  I even happened to have a perfectly sized art board piece left over from past projects to make a sign out of and some fancy lights to lead people toward my door as the sun went down.

It’s really been a lovely day.

And because I’m still in show mode, here is a link to the gallery where I have every painting I’ve finished in the last decade posted.  Tree #5 is brand new and was created pretty much just for the show.  As it turns out, desolate little dried up trees are far more popular in sunny Los Angeles than here where people suffer an actual winter, but I’m happy to have made it just the same.  Feel free to peruse.

http://snapshotgenius.com/paint/

That’s right, we’re doing an artwalk right here!  I have the best neighbors in the world to have put this all together, and this Saturday I will be opening my door to any and all who would like to come in and view some of my paintings first hand.  This one is not an anatomical art show.  This one will just be focusing on paint for my part of it.  You can read more about the event here.

http://artadventureevents.com/

And I hope to see you Saturday!