Carl Sandburg, Chicago
 

Since 1993 John Himmelfarb has been working on the series Inland Romance, a sequence of paintings reflecting the artist’s romantic attachment to the city of Chicago. Like Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago, Himmelfarb’s artistic vocabulary relates to the “down to earth” elements of the urban environment. The majority of these elements are inspired from industrial forms, such as venting systems from factory roofs, chimneys, elevated structures, cranes, scrap yards or railroad equipment. Others relate to the rapid rhythm of the city through aerial views that captured the ever-changing patterns of rivers, roads, bridges and paths.
In the introduction to the book Chicago Stories: Tales of the City, Chicago author Stuart Dybek characterizes the local writers as a product of the unique urban environment and their tendency to romance the city. “Chicago,” writes Dybek, “is an outlook from the perspective of the country’s third coast, a sweet water inland sea surrounded by prairie, a locus at the center of America where there’s not much patience with fads or pretension.
“Finally, at the core of the Chicago Tradition there is an insistence on sentiment,” he continues. “Not on sentimentality, but on basic emotion, the complex mix of passion and empathy we term the human heart.”
Himmelfarb’s concept of Inland Romance corresponds to Dybek’s perception of the Chicago writers. “The romantic attachment to the region,” says Himmelfarb, “is the reason why I am here, and my paintings reflect where I am creating as well as who I am. The two are connected.”
The exhibition at the William A. Koehnline Gallery explores the literal association of Himmelfarb to the City of the Big Shoulders. The monumentality of the city echoes in the large-scale canvases, the patterns of the paintings emerge from the vocabulary of the urban landscape, and the communicative element is manifested by the artist working on one of the canvases during the exhibition.