Harold Gregor, Illinois Flatscape #60, 1997, Acrylic, 30x40 in. |
George Atkinson
May - June 2001 Curator: Nathan Harpaz |
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Harold Gregor, Illinois Flatscape #60, 1997, Acrylic, 30x40 in. |
George Atkinson
May - June 2001 Curator: Nathan Harpaz |
| This exhibit celebrates
the work of three well-known and important artists who paint the Illinois
landscape, either exclusively or as the primary focus of their work. Their
backgrounds are dissimilar—each artist either moved to Illinois or returned
to the state in adulthood. However diverse their training and their artistic
roots, Atkinson, Gregor and Jones have found something in the prairies
and farms of Illinois that has successfully captured both their own and
their viewer’s imagination. Yet each is tied to traditions in a way worth
exploring.
Each man has different roots; each is attracted to different aspects and combinations of cultivation and wildness in the American prairie; each portrays the terrain with different materials, colors and degrees of detail; and each finds energy and delight in the infinite variety and range of possibilities of the Illinois prairie. Of the three artists, George Atkinson savors the details of the farm and its functions; Fred Jones is fascinated and emotionally involved with the ecology of both the wild prairie and its cultivated segments; and Harold Gregor appears detached—even clinical—in his attention to the geometric and design rhythm of his subjects. Yet despite differences of approach, degree in involvement in the observation of day-to-day and hour-to-hour change, each artist has been able to discover infinite variety in the prairie, and each has continued to explore the possibilities of representing that variety. Each of these artists has grown and changed, while each continues to use the Illinois landscape around him as his primary subject. The viewer is treated to a diversity of images, scenes, media and styles, as similar as the fields and woods one can see on a drive through central Illinois, yet as varied as the alert eye can surely see. David M. Sokol
(From his essay in the exhibition's
catalog)
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George Atkinson, Mid-Afternoon at Jorgenson's North Pasture, 2000, Pastel, 10x27 in. |
Fred Jones, Lavender Sky, 1999, Acrylic, 12x15 in. |
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