WINTER 2005

IN THIS ISSUE:

Exhibit Awards - Self-Portraits 2004
           Visual Art and Poetry
"Visualizing Medicine" Reception
Larkin High School VPPA Students

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S REPORT

Dear Friends of the Arts,

The Council has hosted several noteworthy exhibitions in the last several months. During September and most of October the Visualizing Medicine Exhibition on loan from the University of Illinois at Chicago drew Elgin and Rolling Meadows High School students to our gallery. At the reception many interested visitors were pleased to have the opportunity to meet and speak with Scott Barrows, the Director of the Graduate Program of Biomedical Visualization at UIC. The works displayed ranged from twelve pen and ink pieces by Thomas Smith Jones, to the acrylics and computer generated works of Scott Barrows. I'm grateful to Scott for allowing the Council to exhibit this exceptional and historic collection, and for his generous gift of personal time.

The juried exhibition, Self Portraits 2004, both Visual Arts and Poetry, was a huge success. About 200 visual artists and 100 poets entered the competition. As I read the poems and viewed the slides, I kept thinking, we've really received work of incredibly high quality. The judges were equally impressed and both said how difficult it was to choose pieces for the exhibition, and to choose the winners was an even more arduous task.

My thanks to our judges. William Thomas Chambers, well known portrait painter, who resides in Arlington Heights, judged the visual portion of the exhibit. He has been chosen by Governors James Thompson and James Edgar of Illinois as their official portrait painter. Davis Schneiderman, Chair of the American Studies Program and an Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest College judged the poetry entries. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous journals including Fiction International, The Iowa Review Web, and Diagram.

In addition, my thanks to NWCC Corporate Gallery Artist Betty Morley and my son-in-law Jean Luc Garneau for their recommendations of judges, and to Corporate Gallery Artists Henry Witt, Robert Kwas and Frank Tumino who installed both the Visualizing Medicine and Self Portrait 2004 exhibits. And a special thank you to Frank Tumino for his enthusiasm and exceptional efforts to make this show a success.

The exhibit at the Kimball Hill/NWCC Galleries scheduled for January, February and March 2005, Fabric By Design, has been organized by Corporate Gallery Artist Barbara Schneider. A photograph of one of her hand dyed fabrics appears on the cover of this issue. I hope to greet you at the opening on February 13, 2005. It will be a dramatic display of one-of-a-kind fabrics.

Also the call for artists for our photography competition appears on the label page. Please consider submitting your slides or passing the information to a photographer you may know.

It's been an exciting four months at the Kimball Hill and NWCC Galleries. Please join us in 2005 to see our extraordinary creative endeavors.

Warmest regards,

Kathy Umlauf

Arts Commentary

By Dr. Dennis Weeks, Dean of Liberal Arts, Harper College

From September 11 through October 19, 2003, Mark Cypher, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Western Australia, held a gallery show at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In the "gallery notes" to his exhibition he writes "If you examine nature as a concept, it could be seen as a systematic scheme of ideas held by particular social, political and cultural groups and that what we define as nature is a human (intellectual) construct. How we restructure nature around us is an historical and contemporary attempt to build a network of ideologies. Thus defining landscape, nature and ourselves in the process." I was very interested in Mr. Cypher's statement as it reminded me of John Keats' concept of negative capability. Keats, the English Romantic poet who with Shelley and Byron, reshaped poetry and fueled the Romantic revolution during the first two decades of the 19th century, wrote in a letter dated October 27, 1818, that a poet might remove his own personality and take upon himself the qualities of something else and thereby write more accurately about it. Shakespeare was Keats' example.

What is important for me in the statements of both artists is how we restructure ourselves in relation to the artifact; i.e. a painting, poem, musical composition, or dramatic performance. It seems to me that we define ourselves as Mr. Cypher suggests by seeing ourselves in relation to nature and that in order to do that, we must remove ourselves and take upon ourselves the qualities of the object in order to write more clearly about it, as Keats suggests. We must step back from the object to comprehend it. Well and good; we step back and look at nature that surrounds us and remove ourselves from nature so that we may write about it or explore it in an artistic way. Has this stepping back and removing ourselves always been the case, however?

Early philosophers, for example Plato, believed that we copied what we saw in nature and that our art and the resulting artifact was an attempt to duplicate nature. Painters in the French Academy and the English Academy were encouraged to paint nature and being in nature to actually see it was not a requirement. In fact, painters who did go out into the world to paint what they actually saw were for the most part going to be faced with a life of swimming up stream, against the trend of staying indoors to paint imagined landscapes. In fact, the derision the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the PRB, was to face by the Academy caused them to become fanatical about being outside to paint. In one such case to make the painting realistic, a favorite study, the character Ophelia from Hamlet, became an extreme example. The painter had the model submerge in water to show exactly the effects of drowning upon the body. We are told that a nasty cold and subsequent death was the model's reward.

But, here is something that the Academy painter may not have been aware of on a conscious level. If we are the artists, then we are the makers of the artifact. The word artifact is generally taken to mean the work of the artist, one who makes, and by extension, the artifact is artificial, the product of the artifice of the artist. Now comes the interesting part. Artificiality was originally thought of as part of science because the artifact was made from a natural model, an object found in nature, and science is generally accepted as coming from the term "natural philosophy," the love of those natural, science-bound objects. The painters who became known as the Impressionists and went into the world to draw their inspiration from the world be seeing it first hand, it seems to me, had to do that for artistic reasons, but they were not so far apart from their colleagues in the Academies of Europe. All of these artists were duplicating natural objects. What separated the two camps was what Cyper's gallery notes are getting at:

". . . nature as a concept, . . . could be seen as a systematic scheme of ideas held by particular social, political and cultural groups . . ."

If we can understand Cyper, then we can intellectualize art as a construct that brings meaning into our lives. Isn't that, after all, what we are searching for as we read a book, paint a picture, sing a song, and act a play?