ArtScape aims to create an outdoor gallery experience in the heart of the community. Vibrant banners bring color and character to the downtown streetscape, encouraging both pedestrians and drivers to slow down and take in the artwork. Each banner features the work of local artists, celebrating the creativity and talent found throughout the region.

The program is coordinated by Chautauqua Art Gallery, Pearl City Clay House, and the City of Jamestown Parks Department, the Jamestown Renaissance Corporation. Local businesses also sponsor banners to pay for printing and support the event.

An exhibition of selected work will be held at the Chautauqua Art Gallery, located at 318 N. Main Street in Jamestown, NY, May through June. The banners will be installed throughout downtown Jamestown in June.

View work selected in the 2025 ArtScape here: ArtScape 2025

Pictured: “Fallen Trees, Audubon Community Nature Center,” 36 x 48″, oil on linen – © 2026 Emily Rapport

Perusing the city through Google Maps conveyed some of Jamestowns’ picturesque attributes – the Chadakoin River winding its way below the downtown area, historical architecture hinting at a bustling, mercantile past, and unique neighborhood houses (many is seems built before 1940) alternate rows placed along quaint brick streets. Google maps did not adequately express the hilliness of the terrain, nor the peaceful quietude that awaits beyond the bounds of city living.

I like it here, snow and hills and all. I don’t miss the impatient lines at the post office, or the traffic, neither the push of people coming and going.

And, I have small studio with a skylight. It will be interesting to see what happens.

My day job as a website developer is challenging (in a good way, most of the time). I haven’t yet figured out how to make it work with the studio life I desire. I’m never not thinking about painting and art. Thinking of ways to get back to it.

Things I’d tell myself to do if I weren’t me:

1. Look at art, visit galleries and museums, keep reading about art.
2. Work on something smaller every day, for 30 minutes or an hour. Not everything has to be a giant oil painting.
3. Maybe try working less. Quit early while you still have energy to make a drawing or collage (see item 2).
4. Exercise the creative mind. Let it be a meditative process.
5. Go for a walk. I hear a daily walk is good for you and the park is pretty close.

Thanks to a friend, I’m pretty good on item 1. I have some work to do though.

PS: This is not a New Year Resolution.

I first encountered Marion as an undergraduate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The first day of our Intro to Figure Painting class, I think there was a show of Impressionism at the museum at the time, Marion captivated his students by expressing a pointed disdain for Renoir’s painting. Shocking to my 18 year-old brain (I definitely had a large Renoir poster in my bedroom in highschool)! His vitality of appearance – crew-cut, red suspenders, omnipresent cigar and alert gaze – matched the revolutionary impact of his manner of speaking. Every story was an adventure punctuated by curses.

Many of his students (myself included) took his class repeatedly, religiously, obsessively. A magnetic story-teller who was passionate and deeply knowledgeable about painting and drawing, he was sincere in his encouragement. He was just as forthright when he was telling you how much you were fucking up a decent painting.

I clearly remember a lesson in that first year where Marion directed us to the “white” walls of the classroom. “What color is that wall?,” he asked the group of attentive meatheads. It was a trick question that asked us to really look and observe, not make assumptions about what we thought we were seeing. As soon as he asked us the question, we could suddenly see that the wall was not white. We saw ultramarine blue in the shadow and a touch of cadmium yellow medium in the hot area where the light hit it. That lesson was the foundation of my understanding of color and painting.

Years later, I was lucky to share a studio with Marion in Ravenswood where he continued to encourage me and tolerated my “open studio” events. Later, as the effects of Parkinson’s worsened, he had to give up the studio space but continued to work at home – mostly on drawings. Although the loss of the skill he had spent a lifetime building was painful to him, I consider many of his later works successful and meaningful. In particular, a later self-portrait which shows him in his chair at the easel. The determination, focus and will communicated in that self-portrait are intense. It’s one of his best, I think.

I feel like I was always bugging Marion about his website and showing his work (Marion had no use for galleries, gallerists or computers) and I invited him to show his work at the Eat Paint Studio gallery in 2019. He graciously accepted. We showed several of his drawings and a few later paintings – including the self-portrait mentioned above. Here’s a link the press release for that show.

Marion’s obituary was published in the Sun Times here.

For artist Basia Krol, Wildering describes a re-awakening of self-identity through active observation of nature. Painted largely during the pandemic, Krol finds a grounding connection in the landscape of Central Illinois.

In the early months of the pandemic, uncertainty and instability cast a long shadow over our daily activities. Working as a special education paraprofessional, Krol was temporarily sidelined when schools closed in 2020. Suddenly without a job to go to, Krol had access to unstructured time and the opportunity to re-focus on her painting. 

“When COVID came, everyone experienced loss and isolation. I developed a sense of urgency like I had never experienced before. It’s like a Heideggerian existential shift: the act of being intensified by lurking nothingness,” muses Krol.  

Her new appreciation for landscape painting began after a trip to the Indiana Dunes in June of 2020. Krol became entranced by a bog in the distance; the reflected sunlight creating a sheen of white and silver over the water, dead trees standing in stark relief as black, almost figure-like, markers of space. She returned to her studio and quickly created her first bog painting, similar to “White Bog (Pink)”. Having painted figures and symbolic or magical realist works in the recent past, the urge to paint this almost primeval scene became a reclamation of landscape painting for Krol who says with a smile, “I guess I went back to landscapes when I was ready to paint landscapes.” 

Over the last two years, Krol has been working almost exclusively from scenes she has photographed of Indiana Dunes Park and Woodland View farm, where the owners created a vast prairie restoration. While photographs act as a resource and reference for her studio work, it is through meditation and being present to her experience of nature that Krol is able to create the sense of connection to the natural world communicated in her painting. 

Contemplation of the land, its cycles and seasons, are fundamental to Krol’s latest body of work. Krol’s exploration of the painting medium builds from visceral, textured abstraction of marshy bogs and prairies to sinuous descriptions of tree limbs with glassy reflections in clear creeks. Throughout, Krol cultivates a loose, responsive handling of paint that conveys a sense of immediacy and dynamism.

In the painting, “Into the Golden Woods,” a canopy of golden leaves leads the viewer toward a secluded view of rocky earth and tree limbs bordering a clear creek which reflects the sky. The scene is charged with a sense of mystery, softly levitating strokes of yellow and pale green leaves suggest an open invitation to be present in the now. The trees in Krol’s work could be read as conduits, connecting land and sky, bearing witness to change and the passage of time, their limbs gently leading us toward the wildering and un-knowing places where a deeper sense of acceptance and renewal can be found. 

About the Artist:

Basia Krol was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. She studied painting and printmaking at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in Galesburg, Illinois, where she finds inspiration in the local prairie nature preserves.

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Francis Zaander presents an illuminating lecture on “The History of Music”.

David Tortuga, an award-winning poet and legendary furniture mover with a million unpublished pages and three children performed a spoken word piece that may have solved at least one world problem.

We are pleased to present A Conversation with Francis Zaander in the gallery. Francis Zaander presented a short film describing his process and discussed his work with writer Vicki Schneider.

In Conversation

Francis Zaander speaks with Vicki Schneider about his process and work on view in “Field Guide to North American Happiness”.

Featured Artist

Francis Zaander was born in St. Charles, Illinois, in 1984. He received his BFA from the University of Iowa in 2003. In addition to his visual art, he also creates video and performance works which can be viewed on his website at https://zaander.org. Francis Zaander currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.

Author & Interviewer

Vicki Schneider is a writer whose interests include painting, literary analysis, and memoir writing. Notable projects include Museum! during which she spent one year visiting museums throughout the world, interviewing people about their experiences with art and the exhibit La clarté intime de la terre about the art of Auguste Pointellin, for which she did research at Le Musée de Beaux Arts in Dole, France. A retired French teacher, she now shares her time between Chicago and a small village in Tuscany, Italy.

[CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, February 2022] A landscape painter, artist Francis Zaander finds intrinsic connections between the natural and the man-made in paintings that combine a specificity of place with larger themes of belonging, spirituality, and reflection on where home is. His recent work follows a personal exploration of the American landscape, from the Midwest to the West Coast and back. His first solo-exhibition in Chicago, “Field Guide to North American Happiness” includes a selection of 23 paintings on paper and panel, many created on site in the Olympic Peninsula between 2018 and 2021. [The exhibition took place at Eat Paint Studio, Chicago, IL – the storefront artist-run space was active 2018 – 2022]

In the large-scale watercolor on paper, “Strait of Juan de Fuca, WA”, the working over of waves and rocky cliffs give the feeling of a landscape viewed over time and in changing weather conditions. The painting becomes a map weaving together observation and imagination. Painting on site, the artist is both a recorder of nature and engaged in an arduous struggle to encapsulate it on his own terms. The artist describes a typical day of painting on location:

“One sunny morning, after a second cup of coffee, I began the ascent of the rocky bluff above my camp. I took a plastic tarp and two pieces of birch plywood with me. The panels were rectangles about my height and when placed side by side, they formed a square. They were thin, not at all heavy on their own, but once the trail ended and I began balancing them while scrambling up the loose boulders, they quickly became tiresome. Gusts of wind blew down the gorge, threatening to pick me up and carry me to the top of one of the Douglas firs that reached my own height at this point in my climb.”

His smaller pieces (22 x 30”) seem to reach into a microcosmic perception of water, stone, and earth. In his “Forest” and “Pond” pieces, Zaander’s spontaneous brushstrokes evoke the movement of trees, leaves, wind, rain, and all that animated activity of life unseen by human eyes. His few wholly abstract pieces, such as “Water #1,” focus in on a detail and explode it into repeating organic shapes; the micro made macro.

About his own work Zaander says, “Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk about painting, because I try to keep verbal thoughts as far away from my practice as possible. I want to be working more within the realm of intuition and reactions: to get as close to the thing as possible without looking directly at it. I would like my paintings to be spontaneous stories.”

Zaander approaches observational painting as an act of self-reflection. His painting is loose and responsive; more akin to the manifestation of an individual spiritual connection, as in Charles Burchfield’s later work, than the romanticized, classical beauty of American landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School painters of the 1800s. Zaander’s exploration of landscape and his obvious awe of the surroundings he represents, result in work that engage the artist and viewer in active contemplation of the world around us.

About the Artist:

Francis Zaander was born in St. Charles, Illinois, in 1984. He received his BFA from the University of Iowa in 2003. In addition to his visual art, he also creates video and performance works which can be viewed on his website at https://zaander.org. Francis Zaander currently resides in Chicago, Illinois.

Where Art Works, a group show featuring 16 artists with studios at the Cornelia Arts Building, on view at Eat Paint Studio, Dec 17, 2021 – Jan 22, 2022.

The artists on view in “Where Art Works,” include Nelson Armour, Doug Birkenheuer, Sara Boyle, Katherine Drake-Chial, Doug Frohman, Beth Kamhi, Jason Messinger, James Parenti, Madeline Shea, Tiphanie Spencer, Tiffany Stronsky, Kevin Swallow, Sharon Swidler, Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite, Kathy Weaver, and Eric Weinstein. Working in a range of mediums, and at different points in their careers, this group show highlights the importance of supporting working artists through affordable studio space and professional community.

Exhibition curated by Emily Rapport and Kevin Swallow.

The artists on view in “Where Art Works,” include Nelson Armour, Doug Birkenheuer, Sara Boyle, Katherine Drake-Chial, Doug Frohman, Beth Kahmi, Jason Messinger, James Parenti, Madeline Shea, Tiphanie Spencer, Tiffany Stronsky, Kevin Swallow, Sharon Swidler, Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite, Kathy Weaver, and Eric Weinstein. Working in a range of mediums, and at different points in their careers, this group show highlights the importance of supporting working artists through affordable studio space and professional community.

In addition to maintaining their private art practices at The Cornelia Arts Building, each of these artists participates in the larger Chicago community through teaching, public art projects, lectures, coordinating group exhibitions and art experiences, open studio events, and other professional creative practices. Being an artist requires entrepreneurial skills but, unlike operating a small business, commercial activity is not the end goal in the studio. Rather, the artist’s studio is a third place — a space to experiment and discover, to envision the future, and to manifest connections.

According to 2020 data, approximately 70,000 artists live and work in Illinois, contributing to the development of a diverse cultural experience for residents and tourists. These individual artists and groups form a network of tributaries that feed our creative economy, provide jobs, sustain local businesses and make the city a desirable place to live and work. 

The Cornelia Arts Building has provided studio space for working artists to develop their work since 1986. Located in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, the building was built in 1910 as an ice blockhouse manufacturing company. The portion that jets out from the building on the south side were stables – ice was delivered by horse-drawn carriage.

Somewhere between the early 1900’s and the 1970’s, the building housed a clay factory (a major supplier for Lillstreet Studios), manufactured airplane parts, and was a pipe bending operation, before being converted to artist loft spaces in 1986. In 1987, the first Northside neighborhood “art walk”⁽¹⁾ was held with the Cornelia Arts Building at its epicenter. Friends Of The Arts, a not-for-profit arts support group specializing in emerging art and artists, was established and located in the Cornelia Arts Building in 1988.

Since 2010, The Cornelia Arts Building has become renowned for hosting festive, quarterly open houses, providing neighbors a chance to explore working artist studios and to meet artists in an informal atmosphere. They also offer exhibition space for guest artists during these events, allowing emerging artists to expand their audiences and gain professional experience. Visitors can see studio work in progress, learn about the artist’s processes, and connect to their own neighborhood on a deeper level. This creative placemaking has emerged organically through the efforts of a core group of building artists and has made the Cornelia Arts Building a Northside anchor. 

1. In 2001, the Jane Addams Resource Corporation’s “Neighborhood Tour of Industry” and the “ArtWalk Ravenswood” program developed for Chicago Artists’ Month (now defunct) were more or less merged. The event is now managed by The Greater Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce as the “Ravenswood ArtWalk” each Fall.

If you’ve ever stopped by Tamarkin Camera, located at 300 W Superior Street in Chicago, you are bound to have encountered the friendly and knowledgeable enthusiasm of owner Dan Tamarkin. A Leica specialist, Dan’s store is situated in the River North Arts District. Inside, you’ll discover a mini-museum of Leica cameras and ephemera as well as the Rangefinder Gallery where you can view regular photo exhibitions.

In 2018, Dan invited Andrew to exhibit some of his recent work in the gallery. The resulting exhibition was titled, “the space between,” featuring images from a his personal documentary projects like the Chicago Lowriders series and photographs of East Chicago and the Marktown community.

In this talk, Andrew and Dan discuss his current body of work on view in “Available Light”. Beginning at the start of Chicago’s shut-down in March 2020, the black and white prints on view are both a personal documentation of the past two years and an outward search for meaning and beauty.

Miss the talk? Watch via Instagram here:

About Our Speakers

Dan Tamarkin

Dan Tamarkin is originally from New Haven, Connecticut, where Tamarkin Camera was  founded in 1971. Since arriving in Chicago in 1990, he has worked extensively as a  theatrical lighting and scenic designer, teacher, performer, writer and raconteur, during  and since completing his studies as a writer and linguistic ethnographer at the University  of Illinois in Chicago. Nowadays, Dan operates Tamarkin Camera and Tamarkin Rare  Camera Auctions, both based in Chicago. As a photographer, Dan works almost  exclusively with the Leica M camera – and primarily in black & white in very low-light  environments. His subjects are typically candid portraits, the live theater, and the textures  and architecture in and around Chicago, and everywhere he travels. A collector of tenor  guitars as well as Leica cameras and ephemera, Dan is also an avid outdoorsman: “I take  pictures, have adventures, and tell funny stories.” 

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Andrew Steiner

Andrew Steiner is a documentary photographer based in Chicago. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Andrew learned about cameras from his father, a commercial photographer, and immigrant from Hungary. A quick study, Andrew soon began immersing himself in the work of photographers like André Kertész, Robert Frank, and W. Eugene Smith.

Andrew moved to Chicago in 1998 where he began working for small news publications like UR Chicago, New City Chicago, and others. His client list includes The Gene Siskel Film Center, Crain’s Communications, and The Jane Goodall Institute.  Mr. Steiner’s work has been published in burn Magazine, PDN News Online and other online journals. “Available Light” is Andrew’s second solo show at Eat Paint Studio. The first, in 2019, was titled “Wide Awake Dreaming“.

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When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

Images of subway stations and streets empty of rush-hour traffic, a city without people, recall the disbelieving sense of uncertainty felt collectively as the cogs of modern life seemed to grind to a halt. Considered an essential worker, Steiner continued to travel between his Uptown apartment and downtown job on a daily basis. His portraits of neighbors and local businesses during this early time are intimate and compelling; a gaze signals connection, rather than mistrust. 

As travel bans were lifted, Steiner was able to take a trip to Mexico which inspired a fresh visual narrative.

In “Jarabe Tapatío Dancers, Monterrey, Mexico,” the viewer is transported to another place and time. A courtship dance, photographed against the baroque Spanish architecture of the Palacio del Obispado, represents the woman first rejecting the man’s advances, then eventually accepting them (ah, true love). An expanse of aged stone steps flanked by two black clad figures lead us up toward a swirling costumed dancer framed by white stone columns. The black void of an arched doorway and empty windows pull at our gaze while the suited male dancers anchor us in the frame, creating a space for the coquettish female character to show her desire to be free, while also charming her captors.

“It’s like a song,” says Steiner of how he composes an image. “The elements all have to come together – available light, a look or gesture. It coalesces into something else, suggesting a different meaning. That depth of looking – is subversive because it makes us think.”

About Andrew Steiner

A self-taught documentary photographer based in Chicago, Andrew Steiner’s work makes use of dynamic compositions and a background in film photography in his spontaneous street scenes and portraiture. Andrew’s clients include The Gene Siskel Film Center, Crain’s Communications, and The Jane Goodall Institute. Mr. Steiner’s work has been published in burn Magazine, PDN News Online, Commonweal magazine and other online journals.

https://www.andrewsteinerphotography.com/

https://www.instagram.com/asteinerphoto/

“Available Light: Photographs by Andrew Steiner” exhibited at Eat Paint Studio through Nov – Dec 2021.

Related:

https://thirdcoastreview.com/2021/11/16/review-a-search-for-meaning-and-beauty-during-the-pandemic-at-eat-paint-studio

“Still Open,” explores a familiar subject for Rapport – neighborhood scenes and portraits of a changing urban landscape. Her typically vibrant painting palette is restricted to monochromatic earth tones of black, grey, brown and sepia. 24 inky urban landscape paintings feature down-at-the-heel homes, corner stores, vacant lots, and construction sites from the near Northside neighborhoods of Lincoln Square, Ravenswood and Bowmanville.

These paintings are like short stories; each a self-contained narrative that contributes to a larger sense of the current American landscape.

View work from the show.

Despite some technical difficulties with video, we had a lively and informative conversation with artists Claire Elliott, Vanessa Shinmoto, and Alexandra Stevenson. Thank you to everyone who participated! I will be adding transcripts as time allows.

The individual artists process videos are below – Vanessa’s apparently didn’t work at all during the talk so please check that out to see her in action!

Alexandra Stevenson

TRANSCRIPT: Alexandra Stevenson, cold wax and oil painting demo

I’m going to show you just a few quick things with wax medium, a cold wax medium. I use Dorland’s and oil paint and these are a few of the techniques that I used for the paintings that are in “Inscapes”.

Wax medium is like any medium; it mixes with the oil paint to change the translucency and the texture. This is bees wax with a little bit of resin, lots of different companies make it, and I’ve got it on my palette here.

What I do to start with is use quite a bit of the wax in order to get some translucent layers. So, if I’m using a blob of wax about the size of a dime, I’m going to start with just a little bit of paint, maybe the same amount, mix it up. It will change the gloss of the paint to a much more matte finish, matte texture. And, when it dries, it’s sort of matte, satiny texture. I do apply it with a palette knife, and what I’ve found in terms of spreading it is that while you can use a brush certainly, so if I use a brush I can create some brush strokes or scratch through, really the best way to spread it has been to use some paint scrapers and sort of push it into the weave of the paper. It will pick up whatever weave is on the paper, this doesn’t have much of a weave, it’s a canvas paper, but you can probably see if I bring it up close how it pick that up.

I like to start with thin layers; my favorite tool to use – actually, I show you in one moment here, I’m just going to add some blue. My favorite tool is actually a kitchen tool. I’m going to add a little bit of this blue and then I’m going to use a silicone bowl scraper that I truly ordered online from a kitchen supply store and use that to start spreading. You can see how that can make quite a thin layer or even a thick layer if that’s what you are interested in. So, that’s usually my starting point, putting on those thin layers. What I love about this silicone tool is that it is also great at creating lines and removing (paint). So, you can see as I go through (painted areas) and just sort of scrape it or move it a bit, it will create those lighter, more transparent lines.

I continued to add a few more layers, my colors got a bit murky, and I obliterated the drawing that was underneath here which is fine with me. Sometimes I stick with the drawing I start of with and oftentimes I don’t. I let it disappear and discover something new. These lines here were made just as I was showing you a moment ago, with the spatula. Another way to remove the paint which, I find, is just as much part of my process as adding paint, is taking a brush and some turpentine (to the painted area). A lot of the skies in the Inscapes exhibit that I have were done with this (technique) where I’m really just going back in and loosening paint and creating textures.

I use all different kinds of tools to scratch; this is a broken chopstick. I’m afraid because my colors are murky it’s probably hard for you to see what’s scratching through but I think you can get the idea. And then, of course, even just taking a paper towel or a rag and going into (the painting) and rubbing and lifting up (paint) which is what I would do in the case of this one because the colors did get so murky – and I can remove paint that way.

So, my process is a matter of back and forth between adding – adding paint, adding wax medium – scratching out. Sometimes I’ll try scratching out with things like a plastic fork or whatever I can find around the studio. Adding more, wiping off, so on and so forth. And, as I mentioned earlier, the texture of the paper itself or the hard surface, it works best on a hard surface. The surface that you work on, that texture becomes important and you can manipulate that as well.

For example, in this one, you can see a lot of brush marks in a lot of places where the texture underneath the surface shows through. What I did for this one, is it’s a piece of watercolor paper with gesso, which is a white acrylic primer, loosely brushed on so that the paint and wax go into the grooves. Just a couple more examples of different ways that the wax can look: obviously, scratching through, you can see removing, loosening up with a brush. And sometimes I try to remove so much that I get just kind of a gentle stain on the paper for light areas.

Vanessa Shinmoto

Transcript in progress, thank you for your patience!

Claire Elliott

Transcript in progress, thank you for your patience!

“Inscapes,” a group painting exhibition, combines observed and sensory experience to describe a world that is both confined and expansive. On view at Eat Paint Studio, 5036 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, from March 5 – April 17, 2021

Eat Paint Studio is pleased to announce its first exhibition of 2021, “Inscapes,” featuring paintings by three artists, Claire Elliott, Vanessa Shinmoto, and Alexandra Stevenson. These paintings navigate landscapes from the inside out, blurring the boundaries between what we perceive and what we imagine. Each of the artists in this group exhibition find connections to nature as a spiritual and regenerative force while improvising on the duality of their inner and outer experiences. The exhibition will be on view at Eat Paint Studio, 5036 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, from March 5 through April 17, 2021. A Zoom artist talk will take place on Saturday, March 20, from 3 – 4PM CST.

Vanessa Shinmoto’s dreamily primordial landscape paintings eschew naturalism in favor of high-key pastels, wisps of acid greens, pale turquoise water and sky-blue skies. In the midst of what appears to be  a wholly playful and intuitive painting experience, collaged elements emerge from the surface, symbolic fragments of “reality” floating between layers of paint like so much flotsam and jetsam of aspirational living; a single ripe strawberry hangs like the lure of an angler fish, a perfectly tied bow mimics a blob of paint, and a mace-like diamond pendant becomes a starfish constellation. 

“Everything exists in nature and originates in nature, even these human-made objects of desire advertised in glossy magazines and catalogs,” says Shinmoto. “They seep into my interior world, hinting at the luxe lifestyle everyone is supposed to want badly enough to sacrifice their time and well-being.”  

Pictured: “Transitions I,” oil and collage on canvas, 56 x 36″. Image courtesy of Vanessa Shinmoto.

Claire Elliott’s paintings of flora, greenhouse views and garden paths speak to the ways in which humans manipulate nature even as weeds continually assert their right to existence. Elliott’s paintings of thistle, dandelion, and chicory elevate an otherwise common subject in solemn, glowing portraits. Elliott’s brushwork is spontaneous and loose, celebrating the aliveness of her subject. The solitary compositions of each plant specimen imbue them with a sense of fragility while immortalizing the singular moment when they are in full flower. In her statement,  Elliott explains:

“These plants are all cultivated by humans: carefully tended to in orchards, archived in greenhouses and adopted into homes. In all of these spaces, specimens that would never meet in the wild commingle in manmade corrals.”  

Elliott’s window-scapes create a tangible separation between the viewer and the “unruly bounty” of nature. We are squarely inside, spectators of the unchecked natural world beyond. However constrained the viewer is, the act of painting is as vibrant and organic as its subject.  Elliott finds joy in solitude and defiant beauty in her ordinary subjects.

Pictured: “Chicory,” Acryla Gouache on Yupo paper, 12 x 9″. Image courtesy of Claire Elliott.

Alexandra Stevenson’s neighborhood landscapes flicker between memory and observation. The familiar geometric shapes of houses, windows, and rooftops are rendered against a muted skies of pale pinks, ochres, and steely blues. Stevenson uses a cold wax technique which further imparts a sense of otherworldly stillness to her work; the textural surface is meditative and soft, punctuated by the spread and scrape of a palette knife. Trees merge with rooftops and house-shapes shift and fade into atmospheric space. 

Describing her process, Stevenson considers why mundane subjects draw her eye, “Usually it’s a formal relationship between shapes and lines, colors and textures — what I glimpse in a moment becomes what I see in my mind’s eye and then shifts again in the studio, as soon as I put paint on a canvas.”

Pictured: “Not of woods only,” cold wax and oil on paper, 11×11″. Image courtesy of Alexandra Stevenson.

After this past year of shut-downs and isolation, I can’t help but compare  Stevenson’s paintings to my own ‘mental health’ walks. There is an eerie portent inherent in these un-peopled scenes where opaque windows prevent our intrusion into dormant interior spaces. But, these landscapes are neither dark nor morbid. There is an underlying appreciation of solitude and an sense that ‘this too shall pass’ in Stevenson’s work which finds meaning in simply being present.

About the Artists

Claire Elliott

My paintings are centered around explorations of the natural world. My subjects shift between straightforward representations of botanical collections and domestic gardens into an abstract language that seeks to replicate the unruly bounty of plants. These plants are all cultivated by humans: carefully tended to in orchards, archived in greenhouses and adopted into homes. In all of these spaces, specimens that would never meet in the wild commingle in man-made corrals. Viewed either as aesthetic adornments or utilitarian (but bountiful) agriculture sites, gardens are often associated with the feminine. This dual identity of the beautiful and the functional is central to the paintings themselves: the rigid grids of the greenhouse contrast with crowded, unusual plant forms. The abstract passages in these works hint at explorations of the elemental and mystical qualities of paint- its ability to mimic and its material allure often fighting each other, occasionally coalescing in harmony.

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Claire lives and works in Portland, OR.

Vanessa Shinmoto

Extracting the hidden colors the human eye sees but does not necessarily perceive lies at the heart of all my painting. Blue is never only blue, yellow is never only yellow, red is never only red and so on and so forth. These hidden colors give the visual world infinite variety and depth, yet we can only perceive them when we take the time to really look at every object we see.

Taking this time often means hours, days, weeks and even months which is no easy task in an age where technology lends a sense of immediacy to the creation of images. Photography and video can capture images with the press of a button, making it possible to create a barrage of stylized images that often purport to represent reality. In this sense, the act of painting becomes a refuge from the stylized forms and images of photography and video that dominate our visual world.

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Originally from Southern California, Vanessa made Chicago her hometown in the late 1990s.

Alexandra Stevenson

My paintings are inspired by ordinary views.  Some begin with the compacted architectural forms of urban life; others come from the natural world that pushes up through concrete or gets preserved by city dwellers who need an oasis.  Whether I’m standing on a train platform or riding my bike through a city forest preserve, something catches my eye and stays with me.  Usually it’s a formal relationship between shapes and lines, colors and textures — what I glimpse in a moment becomes what I see in my mind’s eye and then shifts again in the studio, as soon as I put paint on a canvas. Because paintings have a life and language of their own, painting is a negotiation.  The paint and I go back and forth, with all the push and pull of any negotiation, until a composition feels confident and speaks to my initial inspiration or offers an entirely new vision.  

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An artist and educator, Alexandra lives and works in Chicago, IL.

“THIRST” is a group exhibition of work by Lea Basile-Lazarus, Cynthia Weiss, and Tamara Wasserman. The artists address themes of climate insecurity, social justice, and the role of the artist as an activist for change. On view through December 7, an opening reception will take place on Friday, November 1, 6-9PM.

Thirst is ragged and unslakable. To thirst is to hope. To hope is to seek, to make anew, to live.  Basile-Lazarus, Wasserman, and Weiss address the human need for hope and meaning through their work. They seek to find form and content that can create space for a common ground and a shared cultural experience, inviting us to imagine the possibilities of the world we want to live in.

Lea Basile-Lazarus works with an expressive layering of images that emphasize her sense of interconnectedness between the individual in relation to society, and the artist in relation to her art.

Themes of social justice, community action, and empowerment are apparent in the repeating motif of house-like symbols and stoic figures which emerge in both her multiple layered monoprints and pigmented paper pulp paintings. “Overcast,” has the feeling of coiled protest. House shapes clamor for the surface, layered with and agitated by the passage of a cacophonous, silvery white line. The strength and fluidity of the paper medium become representative of the strength of people acting in solidarity.

Pictured: Overcast, Monotype, 38″ X 24″ by Lea Basile-Lazarus

Tamara Wasserman rejects labels for her work. Her paintings, which walk a loosely sketched line between abstraction and figuration, are inspired by memories, dreams, and the world around her. Wasserman’s exploration of internal and external experience is approached with a mixture of confidence and whimsy.

In “Drunk by Midnight,” the time and space of the evening are re-imagined within the two-dimensional plane, progressing from bubbly effervescence to chaos and self-doubt. Figures in time overlap and redefine each other, intense explosions of color appear only to be subsumed by the next stroke of paint.

Pictured: Drunk by Midnight, Mixed technique on paper, 33″ x 25″, by Tamara Wasserman

Cynthia Weiss creates a physical and philosophical world in the process of becoming. The natural world takes center stage in these often large-scale cut and painted paper collages. Dreamy, saturated washes of color are the backdrop for Weiss’ detailed X-acto blade depictions of plants and landscapes. In “Circadian,” a close-up of a plant or flower sways against a darkening phthalo blue sky. Looking closer, we see that the paper creating the plant form contains a record of seasonal planetary revolutions. Beyond the plant form, another cut paper piece emerges, its black lacy form both macro and micro-cosmic. This form seems to have arrived with the purpose of telling us something, like an actor who turns to face her audience to illuminate the unseen.

Pictured: Circadian, Painted and cut-paper, 41” x 22” by Cynthia Weiss

New islands of self-awareness and self-liberation are appearing, and the connections between them, which were once so brutally disrupted, are multiplying…

Something is happening in the social awareness, though it is still an undercurrent as yet, rather than something visible… And all of this brings subtle pressure to bear on the powers that govern society.”

Václav Havel, Czech Playwright Turned Dissident Turned President, on “hope”

About the Artists:

Lea Basile-Lazarus

Lea Basile Lazarus received her BA in Art Education from The College of New Jersey and her MFA, with a concentration in Printmaking, from the School if the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been teaching for over 20 years.

Lea has been a recipient of a Teacher Fulbright trip to Japan, spending three weeks abroad learning about Japan’s culture, art, and education system. And through a non-profit organization called Do Your P’Art, Lea was sent to Africa to visit Ghanaian schools and villages. These experiences have affected the images that she has created over the years.

More info at: http://www.leablazarus.com

Tamara Wasserman

Tamara Wasserman was born in Riga, Latvia, and raised in Israel where she graduated from the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem and moved to the US shortly after. Tamara is a visual artist and performer with a studio at the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago. She travels extensively and is inspired by many cultures and geographies.

Tamara’s current work can be best described as Emotional Cubism or Femme Cubism. Tamara has exhibited in galleries of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Tel-Aviv, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Tamara’s art is in private collections in the US, England, Switzerland and Israel.

More info at: https://paperboatart.com/

Cynthia Weiss

Cynthia Weiss is an artist, educator, and a leader in the field of arts integration and creative youth development. She was the previous Director of Education at Marwen, a program that provides free arts courses for Chicago youth from under-resourced communities, and Project AIM, (Arts Integration Mentorship) at Columbia College Chicago.

Cynthia has directed numerous public mosaic projects throughout Chicago that transform neglected spaces into local landmarks. She has been awarded numerous residencies at Ragdale and the School of the Art Institute’s Oxbow Program. Ms. Weiss holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a member of the Chicago Public Art Group.

More info at: http://cynthiaweiss.com

This October, Eat Paint Studio celebrates our first year as the gallery and art studio of Emily Rapport. On view this month, “Everything Is,” Emily’s recent paintings of Chicago’s urban landscape.

Emily Rapport’s everyday scenes of houses, fast food restaurants, and “L” tracks are steeped in lush observation. Folds of Tyvek homewrap are painted as if they are majestic robes, vibrant sunsets transform soot colored snow in an industrial landscape to abstract passages of lavender, blue, and aqua paint.

Seen together, these expressive paintings of Chicago homes and landscapes become a composite neighborhood with a storied past. Emily melds observed reality with imagined narrative inviting the viewer to look more closely at the everyday world around them.

Many of the urban landscapes Emily paints are not typically “beautiful” or even pleasant; muddy construction sites fenced in fluorescent orange plastic, unkempt spindly limbs of urban trees framing the lonely parking lots of fast food restaurants. And yet, these scenes are described in a way that finds beauty in small moments. The artists hand, the (still) almost magical creation of a narrative illusion, requires the viewer to slow down and to really look.

Purchase the exhibition catalog.

[Chicago – July 12, 2019] Eat Paint Studio will open a solo exhibition of photographs by Andrew Steiner on August 2, on view through September 7. Wide Awake Dreaming suggests an internal experience transposed on an observed external moment. Following personal themes of isolation and longing that reflect a larger socioeconomic portrait of America, Andrew’s photographs document Chicago neighborhoods as well as small towns like East Chicago, Indiana and Andrew’s hometown of Fairport, NY.

An intuitive awareness of space and time permeate Andrew’s work in his current exhibit, Wide Awake Dreaming. In the image “Hollywood Beach” we see two young women walking along a beach – observed but unaware of being observed. The figures draw us into what becomes a complex abstract landscape. Two round planters to their immediate right echo an hourglass shape in negative space while they (because there is some weight of personality to them) stand apart – perhaps watching the watcher.

A kaleidoscope of high contrast vertical lines lure us deeper into the beach; or desert as there is no respite in an ocean view, only hot sand and canvas. Just when we can’t see a way out of this maze of lines and shapes, a flit of spontaneous whimsy appears in the sliver of sky just visible – a single person dangling from a large coasting balloon…

In “Man at the Beach,” a hirsute man looks out over an overcast lakefront, seated on a white towel and surrounded by weedy flowers.

There is a gentleness in the slumped repose of a man in self-reflection; a beauty in the details of grass, dandelions, and bushy tufts of shoulder hair. “It is beautiful because it exists,” the image seems to say. The white towel on the ground could almost be a magic carpet as it mirrors the active passage of clouds above. A bald patch on the ground near the rocks merges with the bald patch on the man’s head – a humorous connection between man and nature. The jetty extends to meet the open water and ends in a vertical structure to warn off boats. A single breaker is weathered but upright.

The man, the breaker, the jetty are all lone sentinels sharing a single viewpoint of the lake. Like the lake, we see the surface of everything in minute detail, but the depths remain hidden. We see him and at the same time he remains a stranger. 

Echoes of the work of Helen Leavitt and Walker Evans are clear in Andrew’s subway portraiture. The pathos and isolation of modern life seem to seep into the frame from the rush hour press of humanity. Three tightly packed people are illuminated by the light of an overhead advertisement. They adopt a distant glower even as the advertisement above them shows a similarly arranged trio enjoying the shared experience of meeting new people. 

We can also see the influence of Bruce Davidson in Andrew’s ability to get up close and personal with his subjects. Their candid, unvarnished expressions become intimate and real in the context of the bunny-eared, audience-aware trend of selfies and personal brands. Choosing to work in black and white creates a heightened awareness of nuanced detail.

About Andrew Steiner

Andrew Steiner is a self-taught documentary photographer originally from Rochester, New York. He started shooting film at age 15 when he took a photography class with early mentor and documentary photographer Bruce Bennett at the Norman Howard School in Upstate New York. Andrew moved to Chicago in 1998 and began shooting for NewCity and UR Chicago magazines. Andrew’s clients include The Gene Siskel Film Center, Crain’s Communications, and The Jane Goodall Institute. Mr. Steiner’s work has been published in burn. Magazine, PDN News Online, and other online journals. Andrew shoots both film and digital. He currently lives in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.

Website: https://andrewsteinerphotography.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asteinerphoto/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AndrewSteinerPhotography

Eat Paint Studio is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Chicago artist Marion Kryczka this June. Spanning his 40+ year career the exhibit will include selected recent paintings and works on paper. A closing reception will be held for Marion Kryczka at Eat Paint Studio, 5036 N. Lincoln Ave, on Saturday, July 13, from 3-6PM. The exhibit will be on view through July 20, 2019. This event is free and open to the public.

For many years, Marion’s studio was directly opposite the Aragon Ballroom, in Uptown. An ethnically diverse neighborhood rife with gang violence and peppered with tiny bars and liquor stores, Uptown was (and arguably still is) a living petri dish of humanity. A figurative painter for the duration of its not being cool, Marion painted lush and provocative nudes against the green linoleum backdrop of his small studio. The Cleaning Woman at Rest #2, shows an ample bosomed young woman grinning to herself, framed by a half empty/full bottle of vodka and a particularly insistent red mop handle. A red rose sits in a box behind her, petals just shy of falling to the ground in shame or resignation. Some of Marion’s nudes are based on pornographic images (ancient and modern). Transcribed in paint they retain their essential vulgarity but become beautiful in the sense that they become more true. These paintings are fueled by male desire and an appreciation for the female form, however, the humanity of the subject allows her autonomy. Her gaze and thoughts are not with her gentleman viewer.

Pictured: The Cleaning Woman at Rest #2, oil/paper, 29″ x 18″ 1999 Herman Winkler Collection

In the early 2000’s, Marion’s work became more focused on studio based still life compositions. In these momento mori (meaning, “remember you will die”) paintings, Marion groups objects such as knives, jars of peppers and ginger, artist tools, and skulls in arrangements that suggest Renaissance “vanitas” paintings, using allegory to point to the futility of earthly ambitions and accomplishments. He observes that, “Objects, once arranged, are no longer the same. They take on a new significance.”

The artist consciously manipulates a seeming realism in the service of transcendent perception. – Perhaps one of the reasons that these techniques contribute so much to the quiet power of expression in the works is that they arise so naturally and unobtrusively. The artist throughout his life experience has assimilated the past of art and human histories and, with an impressive talent and lively technique, allows instinct to mould his expression. Kryczka, at the opening of the exhibition, preferred to pass over a point by point explanation of specific paintings, and, when questioned by one of the gallery-goers, gave one of the most intelligent responses any creative artist can give: “I see a painting — who cares what it means — I like it.”

– G. Jurek Polanski, review of 1999 exhibition at the Fine Arts Building Gallery, Chicago.

The language of paint connects us to the history of art, politics, and movements that came before us. Marion’s disdain for “art speak”, his work ethic, and lack of illusions about his own abilities make him a painter’s painter. The subject is the puzzle, the narrative, around which the painting unfolds.

Marion’s later still lifes gravitate to more domestic scenes. These paintings are quiet, self reflective, internal. A kitchen counter displays the familiar sprawl of dinner preparations; raw meat or fish, a transistor radio, half a stick of butter. The majestic trout is esteemed equally for his beauty and strength when alive as he is for his contribution to the dinner table. These paintings depict simple pleasures, simply painted.

Several interior scenes pay homage to Johannes Vermeer’s cool, meditative light and relatively minimal palette. In Light Sconce, a darkened hallway points the viewer toward a second floor, stairs we can’t ascend but strain to see above. Our sightline is kept low by a peaked ceiling gilded with reflected light, a church in praise of the domestic.

Pictured: Light Sconce, 40″ x 30″, oil on canvas

“You could say I have an obsession with the temporal nature of life and the inevitability of mortality,” Kryczka said in a 1999 interview with arts writer G. Jurek Polanski. The passage of time, and the inevitable presence of death in life, are a major theme throughout Marion’s work as a painter. But, this interest is rarely morbid. Marion’s personal vitality and exuberant embrace of color and light, glory in the sensory experience of life.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute, Kryczka earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He returned to SAIC as an associate professor of painting and drawing in 1981 where he taught until his early retirement due to Parkinson’s disease. He continues to create work, primarily large scale drawings, in his home studio. Marion’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Chicago, New York and in Poland.

“Self-Portrait: Listening,” sheet metal, sensor speaker, approx. figure dimensions 56” x 24” each, © Bo Whang

[CHICAGO, IL – April 2019] This April, Eat Paint Studio is pleased to host Korean artist and musician, Bo Whang, for a site-specific exhibit and performance. In addition to his work as a visual artist, Bo is the founding member of the critically acclaimed band SmackSoft (known as Whang Bo-ryung = Smacksoft in Korea). The opening reception takes place Friday, April 12, 6-9PM at Eat Paint Studio and will include an acoustic performance featuring the latest digital single release by SmackSoft, titled “My Way”.

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Bo studied art and sculpture at Pratt Institute in NYC. Influenced by British punk and steeped in the 90’s NY art scene, Bo returned to Korea and began performing as a solo musician, later forming the band SmackSoft. His first solo studio album, “Cat with three Ears” followed up by “The Sun Sign” have become iconic emblems of the South Korea’s first wave of independent rock and punk music. Bo also creates the artwork for SmackSoft albums and often combines art and music during their performances, including a backdrop of paintings and video projection during their layered sound performances. SmackSoft has toured across Korea, Japan, Europe, and the United States including performing at SXSW in 2014. In 2015, SmackSoft was featured in the album Golden Indie Collection and the book The Musician by Choi Kyu-sung.

Chicago artist Emily Rapport will collaborate with Bo Whang through April in the gallery, creating new work and engaging with our audience.