After any pendulum swing of chaos grinds to a slow halt, there will come a time when
you will have to decide if you are going to wallow in the rubble or take what remains
and create a new empire. Building upon recent work, I have been in search of a solid
ground. A bit less kinetic than past work, I have been trying to take what was left
of the world in my paintings and create a stability of sorts, thinking about community
ties and the security (or illusion of security) needed to nurture growth. Cities are
fascinating creatures that I am just beginning to scratch the surface of. The work
and organization that goes into a city’s creation and evolution, the constant shifting
and adaptions and the sometimes hidden history of these changes, and a city’s dependence
on civilian cooperation are things I like to think about. Reflecting this interest,
burgeoning cities have begun to fill in the voids in my paintings. As in life, with
a sort of trial and error, some efforts work better in making the whole precarious
heap hum. I am consistently fascinated by the resilience of life and our ability to
keep going in the face of sometimes horrendous or ridiculous circumstances. My paintings
celebrate this fascination and my love of the urban landscape.
Since earning her BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999, Amy
Casey has shown her work regionally and nationally with solo shows in Cleveland, Chicago,
San Francisco and Los Angeles. Her work has been published in the New York Times,
New American Paintings, Juxtapoz, Hi Fructose and Elephant Magazine. She enjoyed a
fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and a summer residency at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, MA- the latter in conjunction with the Ohio Arts Council.
She was artist in residence at Zygote Press in 2006 and is currently working there
as a Resident Artist. Casey has been awarded two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence
Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize as an emerging artist and a grant through CPAC's
Creative Workforce Fellowship program. Represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago, Casey
resides in a little blue house in Cleveland.
Medium: Engraving on Arches Paper
A bespectacled top-hatted man holding a wine glass while pedaling a bicycle at night under a crescent moon. A chandelier mysteriously suspended from the sky-an open window with lace curtains billowing white against brick walls. Someone playing a violin. Greek columns, neckties, billboards with enigmatic images, light bulbs and candles-these and many other strange objects and happenings crowd my space and continue a compulsion to create etchings and lithographs.
I have always admired the prints and drawings of Picasso, Chagall, and Ernst. In artists like Albrect Durer and the Northern Renaissance painters like Van Eyck, Bouts, and Bosch I am fascinated by their microscoptic detail. I am compelled by the brutish naivety of much Medieval Art-their architecture, illuminated manuscripts and iconography. Being primarily a printmaker, technique has always been my obsession.
When I was at the University of Iowa (1948-51) working toward my MFA in painting I took courses in intaglio every semester. This was under the tutelage of Mauricio Lasansky. I soon became aware of a deep and abiding interest in story telling as well as strong composition. The works of Goya and Rembrandt, Picasso, and Chagall took on great importance for me. Many years later, in 1969, while on a sabbatical, I had the opportunity to study with Stanley William Hayter in Paris. That experience proved to be truly liberating. His atelier was just developing Color Viscosity Printing, a means of printing multiple colors at one pass thru the press. His philosophy of teaching and approach to working the metal plate as well as his use of color opened new ways of advancing my own personal imagery.
I've always had a yen for humor and often I think of my prints in terms of theatre--a stage setting, the main characters, the music accompanying the action, the symbolism, mood, and yes, sometimes even the words appearing-after all Fra Angelico did that. Witness his "Annunciation" in the monastery at Florence where he painted the message backward going from the mouth of the angel to the ear of the Virgin-- so she could read it.
I've been to Europe five times. All of those trips and experiences were undoubtedly of utmost importance to my development as an artist. In the past I have taught courses in Art History as well as Drawing and Printmaking. These together with innumerable visits to museums and Exhibitions have helped to mold my career.
It has always been a "fun thing" to approach a blank sheet of copper with only the vaguest idea of what I'll be doing with it-to see another adventure happen. Sometimes I spend seven or eight months on a piece. Then again I may work only a few days to complete it. My prints have become part of more than 500 museum and public collections. They have been reproduced in numerous text books and have received more than 200 prizes in competitions.
Medium: Engraving on Arches Paper
A bespectacled top-hatted man holding a wine glass while pedaling a bicycle at night under a crescent moon. A chandelier mysteriously suspended from the sky-an open window with lace curtains billowing white against brick walls. Someone playing a violin. Greek columns, neckties, billboards with enigmatic images, light bulbs and candles-these and many other strange objects and happenings crowd my space and continue a compulsion to create etchings and lithographs.
I have always admired the prints and drawings of Picasso, Chagall, and Ernst. In artists like Albrect Durer and the Northern Renaissance painters like Van Eyck, Bouts, and Bosch I am fascinated by their microscoptic detail. I am compelled by the brutish naivety of much Medieval Art-their architecture, illuminated manuscripts and iconography. Being primarily a printmaker, technique has always been my obsession.
When I was at the University of Iowa (1948-51) working toward my MFA in painting I took courses in intaglio every semester. This was under the tutelage of Mauricio Lasansky. I soon became aware of a deep and abiding interest in story telling as well as strong composition. The works of Goya and Rembrandt, Picasso, and Chagall took on great importance for me. Many years later, in 1969, while on a sabbatical, I had the opportunity to study with Stanley William Hayter in Paris. That experience proved to be truly liberating. His atelier was just developing Color Viscosity Printing, a means of printing multiple colors at one pass thru the press. His philosophy of teaching and approach to working the metal plate as well as his use of color opened new ways of advancing my own personal imagery.
I've always had a yen for humor and often I think of my prints in terms of theatre--a stage setting, the main characters, the music accompanying the action, the symbolism, mood, and yes, sometimes even the words appearing-after all Fra Angelico did that. Witness his "Annunciation" in the monastery at Florence where he painted the message backward going from the mouth of the angel to the ear of the Virgin-- so she could read it.
I've been to Europe five times. All of those trips and experiences were undoubtedly of utmost importance to my development as an artist. In the past I have taught courses in Art History as well as Drawing and Printmaking. These together with innumerable visits to museums and Exhibitions have helped to mold my career.
It has always been a "fun thing" to approach a blank sheet of copper with only the vaguest idea of what I'll be doing with it-to see another adventure happen. Sometimes I spend seven or eight months on a piece. Then again I may work only a few days to complete it. My prints have become part of more than 500 museum and public collections. They have been reproduced in numerous text books and have received more than 200 prizes in competitions.
Medium: lithograph, ed. 16/40
A bespectacled top-hatted man holding a wine glass while pedaling a bicycle at night under a crescent moon. A chandelier mysteriously suspended from the sky-an open window with lace curtains billowing white against brick walls. Someone playing a violin. Greek columns, neckties, billboards with enigmatic images, light bulbs and candles-these and many other strange objects and happenings crowd my space and continue a compulsion to create etchings and lithographs.
I have always admired the prints and drawings of Picasso, Chagall, and Ernst. In artists like Albrect Durer and the Northern Renaissance painters like Van Eyck, Bouts, and Bosch I am fascinated by their microscoptic detail. I am compelled by the brutish naivety of much Medieval Art-their architecture, illuminated manuscripts and iconography. Being primarily a printmaker, technique has always been my obsession.
When I was at the University of Iowa (1948-51) working toward my MFA in painting I took courses in intaglio every semester. This was under the tutelage of Mauricio Lasansky. I soon became aware of a deep and abiding interest in story telling as well as strong composition. The works of Goya and Rembrandt, Picasso, and Chagall took on great importance for me. Many years later, in 1969, while on a sabbatical, I had the opportunity to study with Stanley William Hayter in Paris. That experience proved to be truly liberating. His atelier was just developing Color Viscosity Printing, a means of printing multiple colors at one pass thru the press. His philosophy of teaching and approach to working the metal plate as well as his use of color opened new ways of advancing my own personal imagery.
I've always had a yen for humor and often I think of my prints in terms of theatre--a stage setting, the main characters, the music accompanying the action, the symbolism, mood, and yes, sometimes even the words appearing-after all Fra Angelico did that. Witness his "Annunciation" in the monastery at Florence where he painted the message backward going from the mouth of the angel to the ear of the Virgin-- so she could read it.
I've been to Europe five times. All of those trips and experiences were undoubtedly of utmost importance to my development as an artist. In the past I have taught courses in Art History as well as Drawing and Printmaking. These together with innumerable visits to museums and Exhibitions have helped to mold my career.
It has always been a "fun thing" to approach a blank sheet of copper with only the vaguest idea of what I'll be doing with it-to see another adventure happen. Sometimes I spend seven or eight months on a piece. Then again I may work only a few days to complete it. My prints have become part of more than 500 museum and public collections. They have been reproduced in numerous text books and have received more than 200 prizes in competitions.
Medium: Japanese woodblock print, ed. 84/210
Profile
Kitaoka Fumio 北岡文雄 (1918-2007)
Sources: http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/biographies/MainBiographies/k/Kitaoka/kitaoka.htm
and Revisiting Modern Japanese Prints: Selected Works from the Richard F. Grott Family
Collection, Helen M. Nagata, Helen Merritt, Northern Illinois University Art Museum,
2007, p. 93 and as footnoted.
Fumio Kitaoka (Tokyo, born,1918) is one of Japan's finest woodcut masters of the latter twentieth century. He first studied printmaking techniques and drawing under Unichi Hiratsuka (1895-1997) at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko. Graduating during the Second World War, Kitaoka first taught art in Tokyo and in January 1945 was posted to a similar position in occupied Manchuria. His experiences in China led to the social realist series of 17 prints Journey to the Native Country (1947) chronicling his difficult repatriation to Japan.
After returning to Tokyo he attended the evening classes of one of Japan's most influential
woodblock artists, Koshiro Onchi (1891-1955) joining Onchi's First Thursday Society
and contributing prints to its publication Ichimokushū in 1947 and 1948. The following
year Kitaoka created the series The Face of Tokyo, five portfolios of prints documenting
the beginning resurgence of post-war Japan. [See this collection's printAround Ochanomizu
(Kanda River).] In 1955, Kitaoka moved to Paris to study wood engraving techniques
at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He was not interested in formal theories of art, but
he sought to understand the work of Western painters such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse
and Picasso.
Upon returning to Japan in 1957, he firmly established himself as a contemporary master
of the woodblock. His woodblock art was almost immediately distinguished for his use
of perspective and receding space combined with the bold and almost sculptural effects
he achieved by printing his blocks under very high pressure. As one can see in Fishing
Boat and Green Crow (left), this lends a powerful, almost three dimensional effect
to foreground objects.
In the mid-60s, Kitaoka taught at the Minneapolis School of Art and at Pratt Graphic Arts Center in New York.
For years, the woodcut art of Fumio Kitaoka has been the subject of many exhibitions in Japan, America and Europe. Museums that list his woodcuts within their permanent collections include, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum, Warsaw and the Japanese Museum of Israel. Fumio Kitaoka has been named an honorary member of the Japan Print association and has served as Director of the Japanese Artists Association.
He died of pneumonia on April 23 2007.
Medium: Lithograph
Artist Statement/ Info:
My current work explores the evolution of our environment and the changes in the existence
of the natural world as a result of overconsumption, pollution, and misuse of natural
resources. My current body of work goes further to explore nostalgia, fear, ambivalence,
and resistance of technology in our current age. Notions of romanticism in relation
to travel, isolation, and remoteness play out in my narratives. I envision places
in which there is a struggle to embrace these romantic ideologies and yet a necessity
to do so. In most instances this struggle is embodied in animals and their plight
to survive. In other works the residual spaces and structures indicate the pursuit
to exist in harmony with an unstable environment. Structures and events such as
spewing oil, falling black rain, smoking towers, and dark looming clouds suggest that
these depicted narratives and landscapes are a result of human intervention. The
structures that reside or travel through a number of potentially volatile environments
indicate a strategy of reinvention or re-purposing of materials to create quasi-living
spaces and encampments that are just as temporal and elusive as the spaces they inhabit.
In most instances the animals signify the search and promise of pioneering expansion
and exploration as they are found to be embracing, fleeing from, or held captive in
a perilous state. This collision of human construct and nature is exploited to reveal
a fragile and unbalanced state that exists in nature. These narratives depict the
real, the unreal, the tangible, and the intangible to formulate landscapes serving
as metaphors for an ever-changing world in which much of life on earth has been used,
damaged, and depleted.
Medium: serigraph, ed. 4/8
Medium: 4-color lithograph, ed. 51/100
Artist Statement/ Info:
Ed Paschke was born in 1939 in Chicago. His childhood interest in animation and cartoons
led him toward a career in art. As a student at The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago he was influenced by many artists featured in the Museum's special exhibitions,
in particular the work of Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat. Although Paschke's interests
leaned towards representational imagery, he learned to paint based on the principles
of abstraction and expressionism. Paschke received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree
from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961, and his Master of Fine Arts
degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970. Between his graduate
and undergraduate work Paschke traveled and worked a variety of jobs amassing the
experiences that would shape his artistic style. During a brief period in New York,
he was exposed to Pop Art philosophy and began to incorporate elements of this style
borrowing images directly from the print media and other elements of popular culture.
Themes of violence, aggression, and physical incongruity prevail in his work of this
period. Returning to Chicago in 1968 he exhibited with other artists whose work, like
Paschke's, shared references to non-Western and surrealist art, appropriated images
from popular culture and employed brilliant color throughout a busy and carefully
worked surface. Known collectively as the Imagists, their work attracted attention
both regionally and nationally.
Paschke's work of the 1970's reflects society's subculture as the artist replaced
images from the print media with images derived from the electronic media. In Paschke's
most recent work, he enlarges scale to a grand proportion and includes images of such
well-known figures as George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Mona Lisa. His work reveals
a powerful interaction between humanity and technology capable of shaping perception
at the most fundamental level.
In addition to his individual pursuits as a fine artist, Paschke was an active member
of the academic community for most of his adult life. Following brief stops at a Barat
College in Lake Forest Illinois, Meramec Community College in Kirkwood, MO. and the
School of the Art Institute, Paschke became a full-time professor of art at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois in 1978. He remained there, where he often served
as Chairman of the Art Department, for over twenty six years until his death in 2004.
Medium: aquatint etching, ed 12/20
Artist Statement/ Info: ; Author of Time Traveler’s Wife
Bio
Audrey Niffenegger was born in 1963 in the idyllic hamlet of South Haven, Michigan.
Her family moved to Evanston, Illinois when she was little; she has lived in or near
Chicago for most of her life.
She began making prints in 1978 under the tutelage of William Wimmer. Miss Niffenegger
trained as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received
her MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice in 1991.
She has exhibited her artist’s books, prints, paintings, drawings and comics at Printworks
Gallery in Chicago since 1987.
Her first books were printed and bound by hand in editions of ten. Two of these have
since been commercially published by Harry N. Abrams:The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters.
In 1997 Miss Niffenegger had an idea for a book about a time traveler and his wife.
She originally imagined making it as a graphic novel, but eventually realized that
it is very difficult to represent sudden time shifts with still images. She began
to work on the project as a novel, and published The Time Traveler’s Wifein 2003 with the independent publisher MacAdam/Cage. It was an international best
seller, and has been made into a movie.
In 1994 a group of book artists, papermakers and designers came together to found
a new book arts center, the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.
Miss Niffenegger was part of this group and taught book arts for many years as a professor
in Columbia College’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts. She is
now on the faculty of the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department. Miss Niffenegger
has also taught for the Newberry Library, Penland School of Craft and other institutions
of higher learning.
Miss Niffenegger is a founding member of the writing collective Text 3 (T3). Recent
T3 endeavors include the litmag little Bang and some rather amusing dinner parties.
Miss Niffenegger’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, was published in 2009 by Scribner (USA), Jonathan Cape (UK) and many other fine publishers
around the world. In 2008 she made a serialized graphic novel for the London Guardian, The Night Bookmobile, which was published in book form in September, 2010. She is working on her third
novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.
Medium: Screenprint on paper
Artist Statement/ Info:
Amelia Spinney is an artist and educator working out of Boston, Massachusetts. Spinney
was recently awarded two artist residencies from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's
Project Zero, is currently teaching at Harvard University's Visual and Environmental
Studies (art) department, and has been awarded seven awards for Excellence in Teaching
at Harvard from Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
Recent group exhibitions of Spinney's art include Exist at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mayday, a public collaborative performance coordinated with Tania Bruguera in Boston, Massachusetts.
Recent solo exhibitions include With Wings as Eagles at Monserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts.
91快活林 will host three upcoming information sessions for high school students interested in the Early College Program or Engineering, Math & Science Academy (EMSA). The information sessions are open to current high school sophomores and juniors along with their parents/guardians.
Read MoreMatt Duffy, Executive Director of the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce, was awarded the 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award at the 91快活林 Foundation Annual Gala on Saturday, Nov. 2. The award honors established alumni who have demonstrated service or outstanding contributions within the Kish community.
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