I began collecting non-objective paintings at about the age of seventy. After ten years of viewing them in shows , my desire to own one finally became irresistible - just as the necessary funds finally appeared. My adult life has been devoted to a certain kind of classical figurative sculpture , and my living space is well populated with pieces by myself, my father, and his teacher, Milton Horn. All the horizontal surfaces were taken - but the walls were still available!
I want local contemporary pieces because I crave the positive presence of people living in my own time and place. So why don’t I collect contemporary figurative art? Maybe because so few local galleries show anything figurative other than cartoonish Imagism or illustration. Maybe there just isn’t much that I’d want to look at every day.
Human subject matter does indeed fascinate me as I draw or sculpt it. But as a viewer, the subject most appealing is the unique spirit of an artist - as cultivated throughout their working lives. I want to live with : the finest moments of their existence condensed into a few square feet of wall space. In our secular, democratic, mercantile age, can art have any higher purpose? It’s a visual corollary to Walt Whitman’s "I hear America Singing" - though as it turns out, almost all of my artists only reflect my own Euro background - also shared by the preponderance of nonobjective painting shown in Chicago.
Obviously, I am no longer indigent - but since wall space is limited, I see no reason to spend princely sums for blue-chip local artists like Candida Alvarez, Anna Kunz, or Molly Zuckerman-Hartung —- when I can be equally thrilled for far less. My selection process is intuitive - as if behind a black curtain . Appetite, available location, relation to the rest of the collection, and price ——- all enter into the equation. Nothing attracts me more than something beautiful but way different from everything else I have. The diversity of non-objective painting is astounding- especially when you compare it to social realism or Impressionism or classical realism from earlier eras.
All of these pieces were purchased either directly from artists or their galleries. Four were purchased from Thomas McCormick -so apparently his taste is similar to mine. A gallerist’s job is to build value for the artists they represent - i.e. increase their social status - which does not necessarily elevate the kind of art that I want to see. Which is a good thing - at least for me. If market value were proportional to how much I like these things, I could never afford them. When most successful, galleries serve an economic elite of artists and collectors. But along the way, they might also provide free entertainment and reasonably priced art for the rest of us.
Today, non-objective painting occupies a middle ground in the art world, along with more figurative kinds of expression - like the Chicago Imagists, for example. Above is conceptual and gender/racial identity. That’s what most often appears in the galleries of the Modern Wing at the Art Institute. Below is observational mimetic. Further below - indeed, totally underground - are various kinds of classical idealism - including my own.
The 1950’s was the golden age of American abstract expression, back before irony became more hip. In Chicago, it was side-lined by Imagism. It does seem to be making a comeback, however. The only special relevance of the new paintings by Candida Alvarez is that they are really, really beautiful - and yet her larger pieces are selling for six figures. No irony, anger, despair, or social justice is implied. Just a love of life - which is what I seek in all the paintings in my collection.
************
This post is ongoing until my walls are full.
Actually, they already are -
but one space is being left open
for something contemporary and figurative
- but not cartoonish, surreal, or illustration -
It may - or may not - ever get filled.
********************************
********************************
Scott Wolniak, Walk in the Park, 21 x 17, acrylic, oil, pumice medium, fiber paste on canvas
I was saving space on the wall for something figurative - but then gave up. I may never find any local figure painting that I really want to view every day. So when seeing
his show at O'Connor Gallery , I couldn’t resist the temptation to bring home this one home . It's so watery and wonderful - while feeling tighter than the other, larger, more flaccid pieces at the exhibit. It’s like energy slowly churning through channels in the body.
so much care and exploration seems to have gone into this dreamy, ragged, unconventional surface.
Here it is installed kitty-corner to "Advantages of Primitives" by Dimitri Pavlotsky.
A complementary pairing of Yin and Yang.
**********
Emily Rapport, The Empty Lot, 26 x 32, oil on canvas
How appropriate that one of my last purchases harkens back to those sentimental yet powerful 19th C. landscapes that I grew up with in the museums of Cincinnati.
Mimetic images that lack painterly power are what I call illustration — and very few artists like Emily can achieve both.
This piece feels so sad and yet wonderful.
It’s a real credit to herself
It perfectly fits in a stairwell where it invites close inspection.
I love to look at the dangling wires, torn privacy screens, and individual brush strokes — while savoring the tonalities - and pondering the fragility of the human condition.
Sooner or later,
everything in our mighty cities will be a vacant lot.
*********
Hanna Taylor Marino, Birthday Card Scraps #1, acrylic and oil on canvas, 20 x 16", 2024
Another gift from Instagram. The colors are slightly different in real life - so the emotion is different as well. Now there is a hint of looming anxiety I didn’t feel on the computer screen. But it’s still the happy, everyday world of a young American who’s got a lot of living to do.
It’s the perfect foil for the more cogitative Ben Tinsley piece that hangs beside it - as well as the more struggling Sarah Boyts Yoder that’s across the room.
Installed
*************
Sarah Boyts Yoder, Sun Spot, Acrylic, tempera, oil on linen, 26 x 20, 2023
The Instagram algorithm suggested this artist for me - and this time it was right. Every time one of her pieces popped up on my small screen, it rekindled my desire to own one. I was trying to limit my collection to local artists - but - what can I say?
I’m not sure I would have chosen this piece had I seen it in a gallery. The small, backlit image on my IPad feels more joyful and finished than the actual painting - which feels more like a study. The surface expresses struggle, effort, and experimentation. But it also feels like a study for what could become a spectacular stained glass window. So I will finish the job in my mind - whenever I need to. The artist’s powerful unique spirit is in both - and it’s the perfect feminine complement to the masculine Ben Tinsley piece that hangs nearby.
Ii
I sprayed a blurry circle of gray paint behind it.
The background’s glossy surface accentuates the roughness of the painting's surface
so we may honor it as intentional
All of my other non-objective paintings initially appear more skillful - but human life is always a work in progress - filled with false starts, anxieties, and impossible dreams. Which makes this one more personal and honest than the others. And — they all push outward as they pull inward - but nothing pushes out as strongly as this one. It’s great to see first thing in the morning. This scruffy artist inspires me.
Jackie Kasharian, Um 5, 16x16, acrylic on panel, 2023
Jackie was selected by Susanne Doremus to hang a piece in the back gallery of her 2022 show at Zolla-Lieberman - giving me a chance to take a good look at both artists. Something more important, perhaps even tragic, seems to background Jackie’s pieces - and so I find them more fascinating.
I have written about her
here
This piece is a little too scary for the living room, so it’s going in the hallway, adjacent to Bob Lickton’s cosmos shown below.
Bob Lickton, Art #361, alcohol ink on black craft plastic, 36x48,
An old customer/friend walked into my cd store one day and told me about another shop owner in Oak park who was as art distracted as me. Bob Lickton owns a bike shop up on Lake Street. It’s a magnificent old building whose offices were converted into apartments and whose central atrium became a gallery for his alcohol ink paintings. I wasted no time in biking over and buying his most spaced out creation. Its plastic surface is quite reflective so it is difficult to light. But its galaxies are still much easier to see than those in the night sky above Chicago.
I display it in a dark hallway with motion sensitive lighting.
Bob appears to be what you might call an "outsider artist". No resume or art theory on the website - and when you buy a piece, the check is made out to a local charity that provides health care for children. I think he’s really struck by what he feels is beautiful and he uses colored ink to get there in a variety of ways. Views of the universe, like the piece shown above, are only one of the many things he tries. Basically he’s serving the community by proliferating beauty and helping poor kids.
Dimitry Pavlotsky, Unwelcome Guest, 16x16x1, acrylic on cradled board, 2021
Dimitry showed very different paintings back in 2015 when I
reviewed his show at an artist run gallery.
Indeed these two pieces stand apart from most of what he does. We share an enthusiasm for the Swedish painter
Bengt Lindstrom, and that’s who these two pieces remind me of. A cross-eyed wild pagan ferocity.
Dimitry Pavlotsky, Advantages of Primitives, 16x16x1, acrylic on cradled board, 2021
These are the most reach-out-and-grab-you intense paintings on my walls - and I seek them out every day to perk myself up.
Ben Tinsley, Dream Lit, oil on canvas, 24x28
This piece looked perfect for the kitchen when
I saw it in McCormick’s booth at Art Expo.
It’s the most warm, comfy, and inviting piece in my collection
though there is a sense of cheerfully making do
with a world that’s been fractured.
Here, it adds a bit of order to the chaos.
Vidvuds Zviedris, Amulet, 15.75 x 15.75", 2021, acrylic on canvas
Vidvuds makes some really large, spectacular pieces, and this is a very small one - but it still is as wonderful as a reef full of tropical fish. The utterly flat, texture-less blackness always thrills me in contrast to all the smaller areas of color. It’s somewhere in between a small painting and a large piece of jewelry.
I’ve written about a
2012 show and a
2016 show
John Santoro, Kilanea Lava Flow, 2018, 9"x12" ,2018, oil on canvas
The first Santoro painting that I saw was a precise architectural cityscape of an ordinary Chicago street. I wish he did more of those. I’ve reviewed his
2011 show at McCormick Gallery and a
2016 show at Richard Gray
There’s a one-inch solid black rectangle in the lower left corner of the above piece that always puzzles and thrills me. I have no idea what it might represent - but without it, the painting would lose its magic. BTW - the pigment is quite thick, so photos fail to convey what it’s like to see.
Leslie Baum, A Garden in a Vase 8-14-20, acrylic on canvas, 24"x18
A fine feminine antithesis to the Uber-masculine Stanley Dean Edwards that hangs beside it on my wall. Like me, Baum seems driven by an aesthetic she developed while growing up with art loving parents - no art school was required. And though her paintings do bring to mind Georgia O’Keefe and Helen Frankenthaler, they seem more driven by a powerful inner need. They feel like snapshots of a dream life. She has no gallery representation, but I’ve written about her in a several exhibitions at the
Elmhurst Art Museum ,
Cleve -Carney Museum of Art, and
Chicago Cultural Center
Mary J. Arthur, View from Union League Club Towards Lake Michigan, 12x16, oil on canvas
When Mary lived in Chicago a few years back, she briefly joined us in the sculpture studio at the Palette & Chisel and gave us a tour of her studio. I love her urban views that feel both magical and real - so I selected this piece for my
Cityscape Chicago exhibition, It feels like a special moment frozen in time.
It’s serenity is such a delicious contrast with the other cityscape I collected from that show.
Here it hangs with two other small pieces beneath some statuary
Dmitry Samarov, Lituanica #9 , oil on canvas, 21 x 25
I first saw this piece in the gallery of the art department at Dominican University.
It’s not so much about Chicago as about how it feels to wake up in Bridgeport and face another tough day in the big city. Kind of angry and depressing - but also kind of thrilling and hopeful. Like how I felt about the city when I moved here about forty years ago.
In the echo chamber academic art history, no one else will tell you that the great Cezanne could not paint the female nude.
Mitch Clark, untitled (from Riff Driven series) 2021, 24 x 30, acrylic on canvas
Not really a Chicago artist - but at least I saw him here and he lives downstate
He is the only university art professor in my collection, but I’m not holding that against him.
The piece has been hung behind one of my statues
Stanley Dean Edwards, untitled, 36 x 36
This is the most forceful, gutsy, lower-chakra piece I own- and I love it.
You could call it violent- but the conflict is only between shapes of color and brushstrokes.
Poojah Pittie, Midnight Traveler, 40x40, 2021, Acrylic on canvas
This piece is my favorite - so it hangs right where I will see it the most.
It pulls me into its vortex while it radiates passion and sorrow.
Bruce Thorn, Nightingale, 24 x 30, 0il on linen, 2020
I had recently seen
Thorn's exhibit at Oakton Community College and I wanted to buy his rhapsodic "Nightsong". Alas - someone beat me to it. But he showed me this piece instead - and it’s intense fecundity was perhaps even a better match for the timeless spirit of being.
(pieces on that shelf, from left to right:
Richard Miller "Io" (marble), Beth Fischer untitled (ink on paper), Milton Horn "Who Walketh upon the Wings of the Wind", Chris Miller torso (resin), Richard Miller "Gloria" (bronze). )
Thorn presents himself as a normal midwesterner with an obsession for painting. But he’s more like one of those mystics who, untethered to a conventional mindset, sees the unseen and is compelled to show it. It’s possible that, like Jim Morrison (The Doors), he encountered a dying shaman back when he was growing up in West Africa.
Kathleen Waterloo, Plot Twist, 42x42, encaustic on panel, 2016
I bought my first painting to hang above a doorway in my commercial buiilding - located where tenants would see it every time they went outside. It feels so cheerful and invigorating — so full of positive urban energetic - like a block party.
I wrote about the artist
here
I’ve seen her work at Addington Gallery, the Bridgeport Art Center, and Woman Made Gallery — and in each location, her piece is the one that makes me feel happy.
Ii
