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.