Award-winning art from past Drawing/Watercolor: Illinois biennial exhibitions go on view starting May 29 at the Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University. Also exhibited are four suites of original prints. All of the art is from the Tarble Arts Center’s permanent collection. The exhibitions continue through August 15.
The twenty-four artworks from the biennial exhibitions span four decades. Included are watercolors by noted Illinois painters Ed Shay, Donald K. Lake, Walter Sorge, and Jeffrey Little. The drawings feature works by Dwain Naragon, Jodi Bowen, and Sarah Capps.
The biennial, originally titled Watercolor: Illinois, was begun in 1979. It was expanded in 1996 to include drawings. Over the past thirty-one years the exhibition has presented hundreds of paintings and drawings by Illinois artists. A competitive exhibition, the Best-Of-Show from each of the biennials has been added to the permanent collection, with a second purchase award added in 1994. Over the history of the exhibition only Shay and Little have been multiple purchase award winners, with each receiving the Best-of-Show twice. Sarah Capps, a multiple merit award-winner, is also represented by two pieces in the exhibition.
The prints come from four suites, Plucked Chicken Press Subscription Series I and II, A Midwest Portfolio by Fred Jones, and Cityscapes.
Plucked Chicken Press was a print-shop operated by artists Will Petersen and Cynthia Archer in Chicago and Evanston. Many noted Chicago-area artists made color lithographs at Plucked Chicken, including Ruth Duckworth, Virginio Ferrari, Winifred Godfrey, and John Himmelfarb.
Also represented are Michael Croydon, David Driesbach, Thelma Heagstedt. Ruyell Ho, Margo Hoff, Jan Miller, Tom Nakashima, Jerry Torn, William Roseberry, and Petersen and Archer. The styles range from the kinetic, Post-Expressionism of Ho to the cool abstraction of Hoff, and from the quiet realism of Miller to the Surrealism of Driesbach. The Plucked Chicken suites were donated to the Tarble by Terry and Nancy Travis.
Cityscapes is a suite of Photo-Realist screen prints by ten artists. Where the Plucked Chicken pieces demonstrate a variety of styles and imagery, the Cityscapes artists share a basic approach in style and subject. Photo-Realists worked in a harsh or hard-edged realism based upon photographic imagery of urban subjects. A style of art that developed in the 1970s, Photo-Realism has its origins in Pop Art, which focused on the commonplace object as subject matter. Like Pop Art artists, Photo-Realists drew heavily on the imagery and techniques of commercial art.
The artists represented in Cityscapes are John Baeder, Charles Bell, Arne Besser, Tom Blackwell, Fran Bull, Hilo Chen, H. N. Han, Ron Kleemann, Noel Mahaffey, and C. J. Yao. Adam Schuster donated the prints to the Tarble Arts Center’s permanent collection.
A Midwest Portfolio is made up of black and white relief prints and color screen prints by Macomb, Illinois artist Fred Jones. They depict the changes in the Illinois landscape as effected by the weather and the seasons. The screen prints are primarily of summer and fall thunderstorms. The relief prints focus on the earth during rainy and parched conditions. All of Jones’ prints border on the abstract. This suite was also donated by Terry and Nancy Travis.
For more information contact the Tarble Arts Center at 217-581-ARTS (-2787) or tarble@eiu.edu, or log onto www.eiu.edu/~tarble. The Tarble is located on 9th Street at Cleveland Avenue on the EIU campus in Charleston. Summer hours are: 10am-4pm Tues.-Sat. and 1-4pm Sun.; closed Mondays and July 4th.
A division of the EIU College of Arts & Humanities, the Tarble is accredited by the American Association of Museums. Tarble programs are funded by Tarble Arts Center membership contributions and the Tarble Arts Center Endowment/EIU Foundation.
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