A Night at the Fine Arts Building- Holiday Celebration

On Friday December 14th, the Fine Arts building at 410 S. Michigan Ave. opened it's studios for a holiday celebration. It was brought to my attention that they host building wide open studios at least once a month; this particular opening was more crowded than normal because of the holiday excitement.

It was great to speak with several different artists and hear their stories. The building's studios surve many different functions from painting studios, to classical music studios, to yoga studios. Most of the artists I spoke with were painters. They were all of different ages, and have been showing work for a varying number of years. Some artists have been working out of Chicago for over ten years, and others for just a few months.
I enjoyed talking with Jill McLean. She does a lot of large abstract oil paintings with very nice color combinations. I was also lucky enough to see some of the first paintings in Jennifer Cronin's new series. Jennifer has previously shown at Elephant Room Gallery so I am somewhat familiar with her earlier work.

Aside from speaking with various interesting artists, I saw some great musicians. A man named Davin Youngs played piano and sang wonderful christmas songs. I also was more than happy to see a band covering old songs by Led Zeppelin and The Beatles.

"Hello From New York"

November 30th was opening night for Walter Robinson's show "Hello From New York" at Firecat Projects gallery off Damen. The gallery is small and intimate and I enjoyed my visit there. When I walked in I felt good energy throughout the gallery and everyone looked like they were enjoying each others company, the art, and beverages.

I live over in this area and the flyers posted were intriguing enough to get me in the door. When I first saw the paintings I thought of the designs on the front of fabric patterns, almost like sketches but with paint. The vintage, unfinished quality was used with purpose because I think the artist wants the viewer to look at the people more than what is around them and it was effective to me. I also liked the detail of having a highlight color behind the subject in each painting. It really made the people pop out to the viewer.

These pieces to me were a depiction of girls these days taking provocative photos of themselves with their phones or computer cameras. It was humorous to me, and I think that was the intention behind these paintings. I feel like pop culture has changed drastically since children today have iPhones better than most adults. I also think sex is being introduced earlier these days and has lead to the media being misused by children and adults. These pieces in the show had the most impact on me, I felt something behind these more than the others.



Check out their site for more details!
http://www.firecatprojects.org/