Chicago Art by Tom Francesconi

Friedman Fine Art and http://www.chicago-artists.com is extremely pleased to represent the exceptional works of Chicago local contemporary artist Tom Francesconi.

Tom’s paintings, featured on the site, have become nationally recognized for their richness of color and unique brushwork. His works have been published in magazines and in eight books, including the famous Splash 1. Tom is a member of several watercolor societies, including the American Watercolor Society and National Watercolor Society.

Art Institute watercolor on paper 22” x 28”

Francesconi studied art at Eastern Illinois University and later focused on watercolor at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. After 12 years as a commercial artist he returned to painting. Francesconi teaches weekly classes in Chicago and holds workshops throughout the United States, France, and Croatia. His work has been exhibited in many national exhibitions such as theNational Watercolor Society, Transparent Watercolor Society of America, and Watercolor West.

Francesconi has served as president of the Transparent Watercolor Society of America. His work has received awards, more recently the Lakes Region Watercolor Guild Award at the 2010 TWSA Exhibition. He has also written articles for the magazines Watercolor and Watercolor Magic (now Watercolor Artist).

If you would like to view additional works by Tom Francesconi and over 30 other phenomenal contemporary local Chicago artists please follow this link http://www.chicago-artists.com.

Exceptional Fine Art by Doug Frohman

http://www.chicago-artists.com are pleased to represent the beautiful works of contemporary Chicago Artist Doug Frohman.

Doug Frohman is fascinated by how things in nature are arranged and relate to one another to produce the reality we see. In his paintings, he creates narratives that focus on logical relationships and the elegant construction of nature. His “Abstract Narratives” contain compositions within larger compositions, separated by panels resembling film frames. Each work contains a story with scenarios and characters that develop according to how the viewer makes associations and connections in the grouping of images.

Inside Alhambra oil on canvas 84 in. x 64 in.

In his most current art series called “Equations,” he explores proportional relationships and the emotional impact of color in a 3-D space. He starts each work with a simple structure and adds details in texture, color, and design that transform the work into a complex piece. Frohman likes to paint with a workman’s cement trowel instead of brushes, which emphasizes physicality in the work and the role of the surface in his canvas.

Frohman’s work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in Chicago and the United States, including most recently the Kips Gallery in New York, NY in 2014, the Prudential Building in Chicago in 2014, and the Art Expo Chicago at Merchandise Mart in 2011. His pieces are found in private and public collections throughout the country, from the Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

To view more Chicago artists and their marvelous artwork, follow this link, Chicago Artists – Fine Art by Local Chicago artists.

Marvelous Contemporary Art by Mike Hedges

Friedman Fine Art and http://www.chicago-artists.com are pleased to represent the marvelous works of contemporary Chicago Artist Mike Hedges.

 A Million Ways #30 Oil Acrylic on Canvas 2013 60″ x 48″

Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Mike Hedges uses oil-based paint or pastels to create vibrant colleges of color on each of his canvases. He is known for working on many paintings at the same time to work the paint in different directions and convey energy on the canvases. His paintings contain intense color relationships, balanced by form and texture.

Hedges begins his painting with drawing the form, which acts as a skeleton supporting the finished work. Then he applies mixed media with paints in energetic motions, making a surface with texture and color. His abstract, mixed media landscapes represent movement, vibrations, and conflict through color relationships. His works are admired for their elegant sense of control combined with chaotic movement.

Hedges spent two years studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and earned a B.A. in Studio Art at Loras College in Dubuque, IA in 1998. Since that time, Hedges has exhibited and sold his artwork throughout the Chicago area. His most recent exhibition was in 2013 at the Collage Collage Collage (Group Show) at McCormick Gallery Chicago. His works have been featured in private and corporate collections including Oak Park District Administration Building, Community Bank in River Forest, IL, and Delaney Law in Chicago.

If you would like to view additional works of Mike Hedges and other local contemporary Chicago artists please follow this link Chicago artists.

Jack Nixon A local Chicago Artist

Friedman Fine Art is pleased to represent the spectacular works of Chicago artist Jack Nixon. Jack is a contemporary local artist that specializes in graphite drawings of Chicago landmarks and architectural details.

Jack C. Nixon III (born October 1, 1956) is a contemporary American Photo-realist artist whose life’s work is dedicated to drawing and documenting the most beautiful architecture exteriors and interiors built in the United States before 1945. Influenced greatly by the Late Renaissance Italian illustrator and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts illustrators, Jack works in graphite (soft-leaded pencils) on paper and publishes the drawings in small fine art print editions of giclee and photogravure. He currently lives and works from his home studio in Wilmette, Illinois.

Jack gravitated towards technical art classes in high school, having graduated from New Trier East in Winnetka, Illinois with art, history, and architectural and engineering drawing being his favorite subjects, winning his first notable drawing recognition from Northern Illinois University in 1973 while still in high school. But, having no love for math, he chose not to be an engineer or architect, choosing instead to study industrial design with Victor Schreckengost at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1970’s; switching majors to Graphic Design Communication from a preference for two dimensional composition, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1981.


Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower
Giclee Print 62 in. x 48 in.

“Studies in Light and Form: The Chicago Seven and The Michigan Avenue Bridge Sculptures” is the artist’s greatest work to date. A large, 30-35 foot modular art installation of six graphite drawings depicting the many architectural and sculptural splendors appearing on and around the southern foot of Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” (the intersection of the Chicago River and the Michigan Avenue Bridge,) it took four years to complete over a twenty-four year period. The suite is composed of “Study in Light and Form: The Chicago River’s South Side Spires” and “Study in Light and Form: The Wrigley, Tribune, and Medinah Spires” which are two 50 x 66″ master works that are a matching and mirrored pair reflecting a bye-gone era of building design and architectural craftsmanship that may never be seen again in the United States. Flanked by the four Michigan Avenue Bridge Sculpture drawings “Defense”, “Regeneration”, “The Discoverers”, and “The Pioneers, the “Wrigley/Tribune” and the “South Side Spires” the set are painstaking illustrations that document and celebrate the construction frenzy of granite, marble, Indiana limestone, and terra cotta clad, Neoclassic, Gothic Revival, and Art Deco romantic imagination of America’s roaring 1920s.

A contemporary “tour de force” of produced with soft 2B, 3B, and 4B technical pencils, this monumental opus was conceived in 1987 as a special “double triptych” suite of six individual pieces. Each drawing is a separate, stand-alone work that can be enjoyed as such or can be displayed in a variety of combinations. Furthermore, the full suite can be repositioned with the two “South Side Spires” and “Wrigley/Tribune” triptychs facing each other on opposite walls or in rotunda. Standing in between them creates the 360 degree encircling illusion of viewing the bridge sculptures and the many towering buildings from the north and south banks of the Chicago River – simultaneously. As the southern entrance to Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile,” with the winding river forking in the west and Lake Michigan seen immediately to the east, the Michigan Avenue Bridge is the central axis of the most beautifully ornate, most dramatic, and most dynamic cityscape on earth.


Bowman at Grant Park
Giclee Print 39 in. x 28 in.

This massive masterpiece is the ultimate of the artist’s patient, determined, technical, and creative talents which he will never equal or surpass. Mr. Nixon’s drawing style is a variation of the difficult and tedious technique called trompe l’oeil (tromp loi (French for “to fool the eye”)) which involves extreme detail that creates another illusion where objects appear in three dimension. For “South Side Spires” (the most recent drawing finished in 2012), two weeks of careful study was needed in numerous sketchs to perfect composition: slightly repositioning two of the four Michigan Avenue Bridge Houses and the four main buildings; eliminating two floors in the Mather/ Lincoln Tower and one floor of the Carbon & Carbide Building; eliminating a few lesser buildings altogether; and squeezing the entire scene of 100 collaged photographs twenty percent in Photoshop to tighten the scene to match the proportions of the “Wrigley/Tribune” drawing. The two weeks of careful study and image manipulation was as important as the twelve months of singularly focused illustration. The original drawings are currently on individual loan to a number of Midwestern museums of contemporary art.

The artist is currently working on the Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station (seen in deep winter) as a 50 x 66″ drawing which has been an interest and a study of his since 1993.

Nixon’s artistic influences have not come from contemporary sources but have come from the classicism of centuries before. Nixon’s many inspirations have come from minutely detailed works that include engraved and illustrated antique maps of the world by Hondius; The German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the eighteenth century Italian engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778); the beautiful French engravings of the architectural antiquities Description de l’Egypte publication (1809) of its ancient ruins shortly after Napoleon’s Armée d’Orient withdrawal from the middle east; the mid nineteenth century French École des Beaux-Arts watercolor and guache reconstructions of ancient Roman and Greek temples; John James Audubon’s print folios of birds, flora, and fauna (1838-40); Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth, including the Brandywine Studio artists Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. With those representational influences being most prominent, Nixon saw the potential for new, high quality architectural graphics of Chicago’s and America’s historic buildings, monuments, and ornamental decoration that could rival the golden era of etchings and engravings of ancient Rome, Athens, and Egypt. In 1987 he began to produce a series of master original graphite drawings called: “CLASSIC CHICAGO: THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE.”
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UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF CHICAGO – “CLASSIC CHICAGO” EXHIBITION RELEASE
It is rare for a curator to come across an artist with Jack Nixon’s talent. With a superb sense of composition and space, while practicing excellent draughtsmanship and rendering, Jack documents and editions grand urban landscapes and vignettes of Chicago with its buildings, monuments, and decorative stone fragments that glorifies the city’s late 19th and early 20th century Neoclassic, Gothic Revival, and Art Deco architectural styles.

Working graphite on paper, self-supplied with hundreds of photographs for reference, he achieves a special vision of Chicago that goes beyond reality. Mr. Nixon’s drawing of bas relief, such as the four sculptures on the corner houses of the Michigan Avenue Bridge become fine trompe l’oeil reliefs [(tromp loi) french for "to fool the eye"]. Deftly exhibiting [Ivan Mestrovich's] two bronze indian equestrians in Grant Park in bright light isolated from any background authors a new set of graphically substantial icons that match their monumental presence at [the intersection of] Michigan Avenue and Congress Boulevard.

The Wrigley, Tribune, and Medinah Spires drawing casts a pleasing balance of three spectacular buildings in the best possible light and juxtaposition. Mr. Nixon has subtly crafted a strong contrast between man’s hard, linear, vertical edifice with nature’s soft, billowing sky that creates a forceful three-dimensional confrontation with the viewer and these historic structures that by steps weak cliches associated with minor, less adroit illustration.

A master of Realism, displaying a new standard of old-world representation, Mr. Nixon provides us a uniquely contemporary view of architecture as art. It has been a pleasure for the Union League Club to debut Jack Nixon’s work. And I urge everyone who gets the chance, to view them in person. Slides and prints, although accurate, only suggest the powerful impact of the originals.


Board of Trade Giclee Print 21 in. x 32 in.

Dennis Loy, Curator

ARTROPOLIS / ART CHICAGO 2008 – The Invitational Exhibition of Emerging Artists
“Wow! This work is absolutely amazing. This is the best artist in the exhibition.” Paul Morris, VP Merchandise Mart Art Events and past owner and founding director, New York Armory Show.
Exhibitions

Group Shows: Ft. Wayne Art Museum, Ft. Wayne, IN; Rockford Museum of Art, Rockford, IL; Swope Art Museum, Terra Haute, IN; Hot Springs Center For The Arts, Hot Springs, AR; Columbia College, Columbia, MO; Harper College, Palatine, IL

One Man Shows: Alden B. Dow Museum of Art, Midland, MI; Union League Club Of Chicago; University Club of Chicago; Mid America Bank

Collections
Amoco Company, BMO Harris Bank & Trust, Chicago Board of Trade, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Wrigley Company, Tribune Company, Royal Bank of Scotland, InterContinental Hotels, Equity Office, The Habitat Company, Northwestern Skin Cancer Institute, Bates and Carey Law

Recognition
H.E. Wooden Sr. Memorial Prize
Manifest Gallery 9th International Drawing Annual
Oak Park Art League Honorable Mention
Juried Best of Show: State Street Art Fair, Wells Street, Gold Coast, Lakeview, Water Tower, Chicago; Oakbrook Invitational; Hinsdale; La Grange; Highland Park; Evanston; Old Orchard, Skokie.

If you would like to view additional works of the finest contemporary Chicago artists working today please follow this link Chicago local contemporary artists.

Chicago Artist Jordan Scott

http://www.chicago-artsists.com is pleased to announce its representation of Jordan Scott on it’s new website of contemporary local Chicago artists.

I got my start drawing stream of consciousness faces for my father’s amusement at the age of 5 or 6. My father, a sculptor and painter, liked the idea of what my “un-muddled” mind could create without the baggage of any substantial life experiences and distractions. He felt this baggage could often close the valve, or shut the doors, to true spontaneous creativity and play. These figurative drawings progressed and evolved, and I was, for a time, obsessed with drawing my own left hand. I often did this at restaurants on paper placemats and napkins. Some of these left hands were very good, especially considering the age and lack of training of the illustrator at the time. My mother saved one of the earliest of these placemat specimens. It is currently on display in her kitchen in Northbrook, Illinois.

Years later, I accompanied my mother, who was in advertising, to a press proofing in a huge industrial print plant. She showed me some colorful packaging and then had me look at it under a loupe, or tiny handheld magnifier, and what I saw amazed me. The solid colors were, in fact, not solid at all but made up of thousands of individually placed dots. This was long before the time of personal computers and dot-matrix or ink-jet printers, and nothing had prepared me for this concept.

Today, I often reuse and recycle materials outside their originally intended purpose and context. My current work incorporates thousands of used and canceled postage stamps forming abstract landscapes and color fields. These pieces create an interconnected whole greater than the sum of its parts, just like the advertising packaging. One of my current bodies of work, the Vortex Series, uses a simple but effective pattern of quadrants (once similarly deployed by Frank Stella in his Black Series) and the pixilation concept to create a beautiful meditative pattern-field of color and motion.

I often use digital photography and computer aided graphics to help me organize and work through my ideas. Digital photography, and all its many facets, has become a true passion of mine and a creative support for my other mixed-media artwork. I am currently enrolled in the Digital Photography Certificate Program, a one-year intensive, at the Chicago Photography Academy.

          

To view additional contemporary works of art by local Chicago artists please follow this link Chicago local art and artists.

A Unique Talented Chicago Artist – Jay Zerbe Art Collections

Friedman Fine Art features the marvelous works of Chicago contemporary artist Jay Zerbe. Jay uses color to make the space in his pieces appear deep or shallow, overlapping and breaking up shapes. He starts each piece by drawing or painting on the canvas, using preliminary collages and drawings. He creates the first layer and then sets the drawing aside for color or composition. He adds layers, rotating the painting often.

Mud Flats oil on canvas 24 in. x 24 in.

Zerbe completed a BA from the American University of Beirut, and an MFA in printmaking from Indiana University, Bloomington. Zerbe has worked as a graphic designer for PBS, web designer and virtual world designer for IBM. As a full time artist now, he has gallery representation in Chicago IL, Grand Rapids MI, and Detroit Michigan.

His work was first shown in Chicago in the 1977 Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition at the Art Institute. In addition to Chicago, his work has also been shown in Atlanta, Lincoln, New York, New Orleans, Novato, Nacogdoches, Omaha, and Santa Fe.

Jay Zerbe married in 2011, and he and his spouse have designed and are building a new home and studio in Michigan City, Indiana, outside of Chicago. Zerbe continues to work with color and shape abstractly to create visual appealing paintings.

For more Local Chicago Artists, follow the link.

Chicago Artist: Mark Zlotkowski

IMG 4 oil on canvas 48” x 72”

Friedman Fine Art offers a stunning selection of art from local Chicago artists. Mark Zlotkowski is a Chicago based Artist, exhibiting at galleries and museums in both the United States and Internationally. Born and raised on the south side of Chicago, Zlotkowski spent his childhood playing basketball and drawing. Years later, he discovered his passion for painting and received a BFA in painting from The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1987.

Zlotkowski worked several jobs in construction and engraving, which added to his experience of art and material. In 1992, Zlotkowski received MFA from Northwestern University and quickly took to teaching at DePaul University in its Department of Art and Media Design. He has taught classes in painting for over 20 years and continues to create pieces on the side.

Overall, his works have roots in symbolism and spirituality. He describes his process of painting like looking in a mirror, and seeing a reflection of what is yet to come. Recently, he is working on a series of paintings, one group with converging urban landscapes and another group inspired by his garden. Zlotkowski uses his works to encourage his audience to develop a deeper understanding of their own everyday experiences.

Zlotkowski currently lives with his two daughters on the North Side of Chicago where he paints and gardens often. He is represented at The 33 Contemporary Gallery in The Zhou B. Center, Chicago, IL. To purchase these fine contemporary works of art by local Chicago artists, contact us via our contact form.

Cathy Bruni Norris, A Local Chicago Artist

http://www.chicago-artsists.com is pleased to announce its representation of Cathy Bruni Norris on it's new website of contemporary local Chicago artists.

Cathy Bruni Norris is a prolific local Chicago contemporary artists working with acrylic paints dripped onto acrylic sheets.

Ethereal Landscape acrylic on canvas 48” x 72”

Chicago artist Cathy Bruni Norris held a demonstration on June 17 at her Wicker Park studio, showing her artwork and painting techniques to her guests, the North Shore Affiliate of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The demonstration lasted from 10:30.to noon, starting with refreshments and continued with Norris giving the 35 members a tour of her studio. After members walked on the first floor, looking at paintings, Norris led them downstairs for her talk about art and her dripping techniques with fluid acrylic medium and paint. She paints on sheets of plexi glass, letting the sheet of glass dry for 24 hours, and reveals the new, different-looking painting on the other side. She did a similar demonstration for her guests, revealing a finished work on the other side. Then she did a demonstration of a different drip technique on a small stretched canvas.

Norris was extremely proud of the demonstration and said, “Everyone was so mesmerized by my work.”

Norris explained how she creates New Media, digital art that she is known for. She takes her own drip paintings, scans them onto her computer, and manipulates the art in Photoshop to create new images. "I am interested in the symmetry,” she said, and focuses on mirror imaging. She prints the images onto fabric, crystal, and pleather. She displayed wallets with her imagery on them at the demonstration.

One of her favorite paintings, Debussy, was featured at the studio. She said she named it after the French composer Claude Debussy, whom she listened to as she painted the work. The painting is impressionistic, containing an array of blending colors. “This painting works in harmony,” she said.

The demonstration was the first she has given for her art and technique. Norris had the event to satisfy the many art-interested groups who visit studios throughout the city, and share her techniques to the art community. She also hopes the demonstration will generate new sales.

“I work for the discoveries and art has taken me on a journey,” she said.

To view additional contemporary works of art by local Chicago artists please follow this link Chicago local art and artists.

Greg Milne – Chicago Contemporary Artist

http://www.chicago-artists.com is pleased to have Greg Milne as one of its many professional contemporary local artists included on our website.
I bought my wife with my poetry. She was the editor of the our college poetry magazine, and my submissions evidently took her by surprise, she assuming that she knew all the poets in our very small liberal arts school. But I was no longer a poet, having morphed into an undergraduate biology major. The poetry that served as the dowry I wrote between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. She published the three I submitted. But I understood, then, the power of creativity – what it could purchase and, eventually, I would learn, what it couldn’t. In any case, I committed my life ever since to the birthing of objects.

I began the information series approximately 10 years ago. More accurately, five years before that, at a dinner where I wondered out loud if this relatively new Internet might serve as just that…a net. Could it be used to gather vast amounts of information? If so, what would the results look like. Could I make a piece containing the name of every body of water on earth? The name of every movie ever released? Eventually, using spiders and other data mining software, the scientist in me succeeded in procuring the raw material. The artist in me then took over, trying to give form, poetry, and meaning to this, the detritus of our existence.


Everywhere Else

The work, Everywhere Else, was a piece conceived as part of a series dedicated to the gathering and displaying of information. If the endeavor, in this case gathering the name of literally every single place that humans inhabit on the planet, was quixotic, printing it out as a single file was literally impossible. Approximately eight years after the inception of this series, printing technology caught up, and the piece graduated from its virtual existence. Everywhere Else is composed of the approximately 6 1/2 million names of every city, town, village, and hamlet on earth. At five feet by fifteen feet the piece cannot be read without the use of a powerful magnifier. It is, perhaps, the most information ever printed on a single piece of paper.
The heart of the work lies in the manner in which it imitates its subject. The world is large, as is the piece. The elements that make up the work, the names, are tiny, just as the vast majority of human settlements are miniscule, composed of nothing more than a few abodes. A smattering of inhabitants. Every single place humans call home is contained within this work… except for one. The place the piece resides. I believe the work highlights one of the more beautiful traits of humankind, a trait that led us to inhabit every corner of this sphere. A penchant, a love, for everywhere else.


Everywhere Else (detail)

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