At 11:30am and 1:30pm, Sindy Smith will help children write and illustrate their own short stories, with a book signing to follow.

Classes are $1/person, and last approximately one hour. Please call 618.222.5278 to register.

For more information on Sindy Smith, please visit http://www.illinoisauthors.org/authors/Sindy_Lynne_Smith.

Brigham Dimick's "Honor and Beluga"

Painter Brigham Dimick and photographer Benjamin Stern portray landscapes from a bird’s eye view to reflect on family and memory.

Beginning with photographs of his children, Dimick incorporates painted scenes of whales and representations of their migratory paths to “examine the rifts between their innocent musings about the natural world and the larger environmental concerns about the same subject.”

Benjamin Stern's "Workshop"

Photographer Benjamin Stern re-creates landscapes of childhood memories. Using a grid method, Stern photographs hundreds of close-up images of a chosen area and combines them to create an exact photographic representation of the area. “The topological approach to photography gives us insight into how land has been used, organized, and controlled through time.”

Welcome to My World, featuring Roberta Elliott

Roberta Elliott's "Off the Wall I"

Blacksmith Roberta Elliott creates botanical shapes and wall collages using recycled, forged metals. These organic styles and natural themes evoke continual growth and her background as an organic gardener.

Paper Mosaics, featuring Benji Rowan

Benji Rowan's "Iceberg II" (detail)

Shape, color, and figure come together to produce two-dimensional narratives in Rowan’s paper mosaics. As “decorated stories,” his paintings allow each viewer to draw their own conclusions about the stories they tell.

To have your work considered for an exhibit, please submit 12 – 20 digital images on a CD, along with an artist statement and résumé listing previous exhibits, awards, and education.

The Schmidt Art Center Exhibition Committee meets a year in advance to review proposals and recommend exhibits. We welcome proposals year-round.

For more information on how to submit, please visit our website – SchmidtArt.swic.edu, and click on the “How to Submit” link.

Exhibition open through December 16^th

Meredith Foster's "Forum II" detail

While traditional drawings use lines to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, Meredith Foster draws by cutting overlapping layers of paper and Mylar to create holes. These shallow cut spaces appear to have great depth when looked at from one angle, but are flat compositions from another viewpoint.  In these works, she explores the notion of our awareness of a place is a combination of both the experienced space and our idea of that space.

Lebecca Peterson's "Antique Shop Chair"

Labecca Peterson’s work deals with our changing relationship to objects in those spaces. To create her paintings, she prints her photographs of chairs on canvas and then uses traditional oil painting techniques to create their environment. She sees the chairs as a metaphor for the human condition; their styles represent design sensibilities of a particular era, the signs of wear giving them individuality.  Peterson’s romantic, painterly brushwork shows her affection for these underappreciated subjects.

Frank Roth's "I Like That Item" detail

Frank Roth was a successful graphic designer and teacher at Washington University School of Art, now called the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art.  After retiring, Roth began to photograph in earnest. His experience as a designer is evident in the entertaining compositions he selects from seemingly random groups of people or views of the landscape. Once the image is chosen, he expertly controls the printing process to produce a print comparable in quality to the work of a master lithographer or other fine art print.  After seeing Roth’s work, the print button on your computer will seem like a mere toy.

Doug Eskra retired last year after 40 years on the SWIC art faculty.  He too, is an example of “making it.” He has successfully made a life in art for himself.

For more information on our programs and exhibitions, as well as directions, please visit us at SchmidtArt.swic.edu.

In her recent sculptural wall pieces, St.Louis-based artist Jane Birdsall-Lander reconfigures found objects and then binds them together with pigment stained waxed linen thread to build a group of primal alphabet forms. Made from cast offs such as salvaged wooden canes and scythe handles these pieces have the prehensile tension of primitive objects while at the same time they are elegant and seamlessly crafted. Conceptually the sculptures are inspired by the artist’s interest in the evolution of pictographs and ideographs into the modern alphabet as well as her desire to incorporate recycled artifacts into the sculptures. Her object/signs project a hands width from the wall cast shadows on the wall above and below. In this work Birdsall-Lander draws upon the alphabet as a source evoking a primitive communicative sense somewhere between music and poetry. These forms which are at the same time ideas and primordial shapes, sometimes assume a symbolic stance referring to the instinctive positions the animal and human body can assume at moments of deep emotion. Victor Hugo writes that “human society, the world the whole of mankind is in the alphabet” and so it is with Birdsall-Lander’s “Bound Alphabet.”

Joanne Kluba's "Garden of Earthly Delights, Revisited"

Hailing from Edwardsville, Illinois, Bill Harroff creates digital artwork that is both an homage to comic book artists and writers of the 1950s and a stinging criticism of the culture wars critic of the time, Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham, the author of Seduction of the Innocent, claimed that reading comic books cause juvenile delinquency.

Harroff’s work plays off of Wertham’s assumptions about what people “saw” in comic books – and what comic books led to – by digitally manipulating small sections of comic book images.

Here are a few of the tiles you can see at the Schmidt. Remember: Bill informs us that perversity is in the eye of the beholder!

"RestInANiceElectricChair"

Marcus Griffen’s Movable Type #2: Perception

Marcus Griffen, another Edwardsville artist and graphic designer, works with the idea of taking graphic design back as an art form, as well as adding an interactive element.

Griffen makes mutoscopes, which were early motion picture devices invented in the late 1800s and worked on the same principle as the flip book. Mutoscopes were popular in Penny Arcades, in which patrons viewed the coin-operated animations or movies through a single lens enclosed by a hood.

Movable Type #2: Perception features letter forms that create the animation. Visitors to the Schmidt are encouraged to play with the mutoscope.

A video of the animation is available here.

Movable Type #2: Perception

Artist Bill Harroff manipulates graphic novel and comic book pictures into subversive, kaleidoscope-like images. Here, they are printed on 6"x6" ceramic tiles.

All books look about the same, right? Think again with B.O.O.C. (Beautiful, Original, Outrageous, & Clever), which showcases unique and unusual books. B.O.O.C. featured artists are M.J. Goerke, William Harroff, Joanne Kluba, Bob Smith, Marcus Griffen, & Barbara Wiese.

A mutoscope by Marcus Griffen

Lyrical Objects features artist Jane Birdsall Lander, who, through the inspiration of graphic representations and meanings of ancient letter forms, assembles steam-bent wood with wrapped wax linen thread to create sculptures of uncommon originality and beauty.

Jane Birdsall Lander's "Ghost Oar"

Join us for the opening reception of B.O.O.C. / Lyrical Objects on Thursday, September 1 from 6 – 8 p.m.

Artist Statement:

On the artist Raphael Sanzio called “Raphael”

Urbino, Italy 1483 – 1520

In his brief life of 37 years, Raphael became the most venerated artisan of the Italian High Renaissance. To give some idea of his status, after Raphael’s death one of his contemporaries wrote,

“With the death of this admirable artist, painting might well have died also. For when he closed his eyes, she was left all but blind. It is indeed to him that the arts, coloring and invention have all been brought to such perfection that further progress can hardly be expected and it is unlikely that anyone will ever surpass him.”

If that eulogy were not enough evidence of his status, we know from history

that Raphael’s influence continued throughout Europe for centuries after his passing. Ingres, Bouguereau, and Picasso were just a few of his ardent admirers.

My color rendition of Raphael’s Holy Family of Francis l (so named because it was commissioned by the ruler) required about 8 months of 10- to 14- hour days to complete. It is approximately the size of Raphael’s original now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The framing is my own design and handiwork.

Probably in no other manner can a person gain as much appreciation for another artist’s work as by taking the initiative to reproduce the work.  It is my hope that in this project I have paid a worthy tribute to this important artist and brought some level of interest and enjoyment to whomever views it.  This is not an attempt to promote a specific religious viewpoint, but to offer an image of universal appeal regardless of faith.  Underlying the portrayal of the Holy Family is the direct human sentiment expressing warm family unity.

A work of art isn’t truly finished until it is on display.  Enjoy!

Edmund Bazan

O Fallon, Illinois

June 2011

Thanks to the Schmidt Art Center for their assistance in this exhibit.

You may remember Ed Bazan from our Colored Pencil exhibit in fall 2009.

Can you answer the questions?

1. How many dogs were done by DeDe LaRue?

2. What is the title of George Finch’s sculpture?

3. What breed of dog are the inkwells?

4. Can you find the nutcracker? What is the title?

5. How big (in inches) is the 20th century Great Dane?

6. Who is the artist of Stumped?

7. Find the bow tie. What is the sculpture?

8. What is DeDe LaRue’s Blue Afghan Hound made out of?

9. Can you find all of the non-dog animals in the sculptures? What are they?

10. How many dog ears are in the exhibition?

Bonus: How many dogs have collars?

The scavenger hunt is available at the front desk, and prizes are awarded for correct answers.