The Chicago Realists (2015)

PA

www.poetsandartists.com

Issue #60 January 2015

Elizabeth Claire

Chicago's New Realists is an exhibit which showcases many up and coming painters from Chicago who have found their voice in figurative art. These artists come from diverse backgrounds, age groups, professions, and they are all united in their love of realist painting. This show demonstrates that in a time where installation and conceptual art dominate the Art World, classical realism is still relevant, and Chicago is helping to make that happen.

Chicago's New Realists Daliah Ammar Lisa Carter Rae Clatch LeMay Cox Jared Deinlein Tim DeRose Adam Holzrichter Cameron Jon Dougan Khim Sandra Mckibben Justin Mueller

Nicholas Nadja Lucia Novoa Linda Finer O'Connor Elizabeth Ospina Ian Reynold Jeremy Steffen Thelonious Stokes Sandra Stone Maro Vizarro Aras Volodka

January 16 to March 11, 2015

Opening: Friday, Jan 16 from 7-10pm

Zhou B Art Center Fourth Floor 1029 W. 35th St • Chicago, IL 60609 Jared Deinlein

www.33contemporary.com

Aras Volodka

At the Lathe 2009 ink on paper 21 x 15

Aras Volodka is an oil painter and draftsman who studied at the American Academy of Art. His work is currently a series focused on showing artisans and other craftspeople at work. Aras’s images are interleaved compositionally or vignetted with “memory capsules,” small, capsule shaped windows placed in a comic book-esque arrangement. He has shown work at several group shows in Chicago, and won a 1st prize award for his painting Colby Turner. His primary influences include Pieter Bruegel the Elder, R. Crumb, Vermeer, Ivan Albright, Albrecht Durer, and Alphonse Mucha. Aras currently resides in Chicago where he paints at his home studio.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

A figurative painter with gin martini, Tums, and cigarettes 2012 ink on paper 21 x 15

The Jewelsmith (in progress) 2015 oil on panel 45 x 30

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Quintuple self portrait; recording esoteric pop music 2012 oil on linen 36 x 28

Thelonious Stokes

Red Sleeve 2013 mixed media on board 24 x 24

Thelonious is a young, Chicago based artist who has done painting. Born and raised in the poverty stricken communities of Chicago, IL. Thelonious’s mother, Vikki Omega Stokes, knew it was her responsibility to raise Thelonious and his younger brother to defy all barriers of their surroundings. Acknowledging his creativity as the “way-out” early in life, Thelonious found himself sketching a subtle taste of Fine Art as a child. Experimenting with a rich stream of medium, from oil paint to moving image, Thelonious expresses a somewhat post modern platform, not only toward the Black community, but from the stance of “human” as a unit.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Symphony in Black, White, and Creole 2014 mixed media 48 x 24

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Daliah Ammar

An Ocean Called you (Teach Me How to Swim) 2014 oil on linen 12 x12

Daliah Ammar is a nineteen-year-old Palestinian-American artist based in Chicago, IL and is currently earning her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The purpose of Daliah’s work is to transcend the notion of the self and the physicality of paint, resonating from her own vulnerable and personal experiences, as a means of conveying life as it blooms and decays from within. Expressing that awareness of the self and reflecting to the viewer establishes a relationship between themselves and herself. Daliah’s works are confrontational, yet intimate and personal – using the painted surface as a trope for the physical and psychological presence between the inner self and external viewer.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Castor and Pollux( Do Not Choose Sides) 2014 oil on canvas 36 x 48

Denouement 2014 oil on canvas 32 x 48

The Flood (Please Stay) 2014 oil on canvas 16 x 22

Daliah Ammar

Ian Reynold

Self Portrait 2014 oil on linen 36 x 24

Ian Reynold is a painter currently based in Oakland, California. He has recently returned from Norway after a three month residency with Odd Nerdrum. From 2010 to 2012 he studied with Ryan Shultz in Chicago. His work is figurative and often the figures are being transformed in some way. From subtle clouds of color bleeding off of background textiles onto the skin, to parts of the figure transitioning into something inhuman or dissolving into thin air. See more of Ian’s work at Ian Reynold.com.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Sandra Stone Front Cover Adam 2014 oil on linen 36 x 24

Sandra Stone grew up in Detroit and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she majored in fashion design.

After graduating, she briefly worked on a collection for a clothing line, but soon turned her efforts to pursuing fine art and teaching.

Her interests in painting stem from a desire to create narrative works that make the viewer reflect, rendered in the sensuous medium that is oil paint. The work is inspired by the techniques and visual tropes seen in artists like Caravaggio and many of the other great Baroque Masters. Her painting, “Adam,” shows her interest in Biblical narratives that are set in a contemporary context. She is currently working on a series of paintings that put a modern twist on the classic theme of the seven deadly sins.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Jeremy Steffen

Faces in the Abstract 2014 oil on board 36 x 24

Jeremy Steffen grew up in a small town in Indiana where he spent most his time developing his skills and techniques in painting. It wasn’t until moving to Chicago and going to Columbia College that he began utilizing his practices conceptually. During this time Jeremy was also being introduced to a new urban culture and surrounded himself with unique, contemporary artists. After bouncing around amongst many different genres and spending countless hours studying all kinds of artists, from Caravaggio to Robert Crumb, Jeremy eventually noticed himself becoming more and more fascinated with the Relationships that artists had with their work, rather then the actual work itself. With this fascination in mind Jeremy developed a series of paintings using his closest peers in order to portray that Art And Artist Relationship. Currently Jeremy is still making additions to this series along with developing other work with similar intention, All while maintaining a job as a waiter and building a career in tattooing and animation.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Lucia Novoa

Lucia 2014 oil on linen 30 x 24

Lucia Novoa is an twenty-six years old, Argentinian-Mexican artist. She is currently earning her BFA in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her paintings are informed by her ambivalence towards the modern internet age, and intend to reverse the ephemeral, fleeting, insubstantial quality of images, by creating meaning through labor and classic techniques. In her newest series, she is making paintings that deal with insecurities of the body, pictured through voyeuristic images.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Maro Bizarro

Mitso 2014 oil on linen 16 x12

Maro Bizarro attended Lawrence University in Wisconsin where she studied sculpture. She was drawn to sculpture because it married her love of the human form with her desire to express her creativity. After University, she relocated to Greece where she implemented the skill set she learned doing stage design and special effects makeup. After 5 years abroad, she relocated back to the United States to develop her skills as a painter. Her oil portraits use the faces of her loved ones to highlight the disconnect between appearances and the internal emotional landscape.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Zana 2014 oil on linen 16 x12 PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Nicholas Nadja

I Once Was What You Are, and What I am You Soon Will Become 2013 oil on canvas 44 x 34

Nicholas Nadja is a visual artist currently based in Chicago, IL. In addition to his private tutelage under Ryan Shultz, Nicholas has studied at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His influences have also been driven by his experience living in Florence in 2012, where he learned about organic farming and painted the scenic landscapes of Tuscany. In his work, there is a focus on narrative figurations with a timeless quality. The emotion is capitalized by the realism in oil, and the contextual relations of each figure. Their environment is significant equally as their existence in the painting, since travel plays such an important part in the experience of the artist. In very thin layers of color he imparts volumetric consistency, and builds out the tones in the painting to make the subjects radiate from the inside out and expressing a Baroque modernization in painting.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Justin Mueller

You’re Late 2012 oil on canvas 36 x 48

Justin H. E. Mueller was born in downtown Chicago, on March 31st 1987, to a German Father and Filipino Mother. He started to take painting seriously painting at age 13 in water colors and acrylic. With an interest in oils and no formal training, a friend led him to Ryan Shultz in 2005. Most of his inspirations come from his mixed culture background and his reading and interpretation of classical children’s literature.When not painting, he spends his time working as a pastry chef, singing opera with friends, and teaching swimming lessons.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Lisa Carter

Self Portrait 2011 oil on linen 32 x 36

Lisa Carter has been creating art since graduating with her B.F.A from London’s Hornsey College of Art. Over the years she has developed and experimented in many different methods. At college she created large-scale textural abstractive pieces of which 2 were exhibited in The Institute of Contemporary Art in London. For a few years after leaving, she was very immersed in print making, especially etching and monoprinting, one of which won an award from The Royal Academy of Art in London. Moving on from print making, she developed her own very naïve painting style, dealing with semi-autobiographical, tragic events from her life. Currently, aside from her mixed media collages, her work has focused on precise, realistic portraits which often delve into these same darker themes.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Josh 2012 oil on linen 42 x 42

Bella 2013 oil on tempera on panel 12 x 12

Rae Clatch

Victoria 2011 oil on linen 24 x 24

Rae Clatch was born in 1992 in St. Louis, Missouri and studied art at MICA after her high school tutelage with Ryan Shultz. Love, Loss, and personal experience are center to Rae Clatch’s artwork. She is a painter but as an artist, she enjoys working in many different media, including fibers, mixed media, and film. Her paintings of supine or falling girls reflect experiences of her and her peers in a state of fragility.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Falling Girl 2011 oil on linen 24 x 24

Jared Deinlein

Girl in Field 2014 oil on panel 24 x 24

As an artist who grew up in a military family, Jared Deinlein had a transient upbringing. His interest in art began as a young man and has continued throughout his schooling at the University of Illinois. Jared is the type of artist who relishes his experiences in SRO’s, his work as a dishwasher, and his free-time, which he devotes to reading books on AnarchoCommunism. Whatever he creates is consumed by a love of aesthetics, balance, and the ability for art to transform our neurochemistry.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Tim DeRose

Self Portrait 2014 oil on linen 16 x 13

Tim DeRose is a tattoo artist and painter from Glenview Illinois. Tim studied art education at Greensborough College but soon realized – after his first tattoo - his vocation in tattooing and his commitment to fine art as a vocation. His interest in art was inspired and informed by the Spawn comic books of his youth and the neon, hallucinatory work of Ron English. He currently works at Speakeasy Custom Tattoo in Wicker Park, Chicago. See more of his work online on instagram @timderose.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Linda O’Connor Finer Cupid 2014 oil on canvas 48 x 32

Linda O’Connor Finer is a professional gardener, a mother of two, and only recently started doing art in the last few years.

She studied Sociology at Boston University and Gardening Arts at Harvard, but she always had a passion for the arts, growing up in an area rich with museums and culture. With an interest in Northern Renaissance Art, Linda has embarked on a series of paintings which take from the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder while simultaneously placing them in a modern context. For example, her painting “Cupid,” shows the influence of Renaissance iconography and attention to the nude figure, while showing the artifice of the mythological wings as visually evidenced by the straps that hold them on her form.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Adam Holzrichter

Teresa Watching Television 2014 oil on canvas 12 x 9

Adam Holzrichter is currently living and working in Chicago. After attending the American Academy of Art for painting and illustration, he exhibited and worked in California (San Francisco, Los Angeles) over the past six years in fine art, video production design/fabrication, puppetry, and animation. His work depicts his subjects as they appear in his life to hold personal meaning.

While biographical, the portraiture tends to follow a relational narrative between subject and artist. His work often uses symbols of expression in tension and release, shifting between allegorical and realistic themes. As forms emerge from darkness - or stare into television screens - they possess equal states of accountability. The humanistic symbols used within his work force central focus toward those who appear under serene duress. Protagonists often surrender in situations beyond their control to find bliss within the confines of rationality.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Adam Holzrichter

Alyssa 2014 oil on linen 24 x 36

Homeless Yoga 2014 oil on board 16 x 24 PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Sandra McKibben

Rosca de Reyes 2014 oil on linen 30 x 24

Sandra McKibben is a Chicago born Puerto Rican artist. She is a wife and mother of two residing in Park Ridge, Illinois. Her art is influenced by her Hispanic heritage and her love of realist art. Sandra’s art is both serious and whimsical, dealing with the conflation of “cheap, low-brow” artifacts from her heritage, as well as other ceremonial and ritualistic objects of the “high-brow/Holy.” Her art is a close examination of the ordinary and the supernatural, representing them with both respect and curiosity.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Cameron Jon

Self Portrait 2014 oil on linen 16 x 20

Born in 1989, Cameron Jon began his life as an artist at a very early age drawing anything from Ren & Stimpy to portraits of Beethoven. Now he divides his time between drawing comics, painting portraits, and playing jazz guitar. His influences range from Brian Michael Bendis to Ingmar Bergman to Jorge Borges. Cameron is currently working on a project documenting dreams with themes of death that incorporates traditional brush and ink techniques.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

La Croix Mystique

Self Portrait at F. Sauter Building

Tres Damas

All works on this page are ;en and ink 8.5 x 10

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Elizabeth Claire

Turning Away 2014 oil on linen 24 x 24

Elizabeth Claire is an American artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Elizabeth earned a Doctorate in Pharmacology from Midwestern University in 2011, and since early 2014, has been rigorously studying oil painting under the instruction of Ryan Shultz. Elizabeth’s interests range from world traveling to expanding her knowledge of the hard sciences; her influences from the sacred art of the old masters to the profane side of human sexuality. As she continues to improve her technique and develop her own style of painting, Elizabeth strives to express the complexity of the human condition through her artwork, striving to evoke an emotional response.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Vanitas 2014 oil on linen 12 x 12

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Dougan Khim

Kenn Close-up 2014 oil on linen 38 x 60

Mold 2011 oil on canvas 24 x 48

Dougan Khim thinks the term ‘artist’ is a difficult one, one that implies accomplishment of the profound sort and too weighty for a man still addicted to Oreo ice cream and The Simpsons. Aside from designing shoes, collaging human-flora hybrids, and painting portraits in his underwear, Dougan spends time contemplating his mortality or thinking about when people finally invented toilet paper. As a continuing art scholar, he wishes the word ‘apprentice’ was still used these days, or, for the very least, padawan.

PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Wander 2013 oil on linen 36 x 48 PA #60 CHICAGO’s NEW REALISTS curated by Ryan Shultz JANUARY 2015

Mother’s Hands 2010 oil on canvas 11 x 14

Dougan Khim

Ryan Shultz received his bachelor’s degree from The American Academy of Art in 2005 and his M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 2009.

Shultz’s work deals primarily with youth culture and the “cult of excess,” depicting scenes of intoxication and drug use; alienation and ecstasy.

His works embrace the art historical canon, borrowing compositional devices, technical processes, poses and gestures from classical painting.

Shultz is equally influenced by popular culture, film, and the fashion world, referencing this imagery in the subject matter and scenarios that he creates.

Currently, Shultz spends his days teaching and painting at his studio in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. For the artist, teaching is not only a job but a passion. Since technical skill is rarely emphasized in contemporary art schools, he feels it his duty to pass on the knowledge of the techniques of the Old Masters.