A Visit to the Harper College Art Gallery

Lift Off space art painting
Lift Off digital space art painting

Yesterday I visited the Harper College Art Gallery. The impetus was my decision to enter the 33rd Harper College National Art Exhibition, featuring Small Works juried exhibition. It was my first visit to Harper's art gallery. Currently on display is an exhibit titled House Painting.

The artist behind House Painting is Matt Irie. The exhibit featured 8 latex paint on wood panel paintings. The common element of all the paintings was the use of only straight lines of paint, each a little more than 1/8 inch wide. The paintings were of two compositional styles. One type featured straight overlapping lines of paint laid out in a horizontal and vertical grid. The second type featured the same straight lines but oriented so that there were no horizontal or vertical lines in the composition.

The House Painting exhibit runs January 19 through February 11 2010. There will be an artist's reception on February 3. For more information, phone 847.925.6568.

Probably planned to coincide with the main exhibit, on the wall adjacent to the gallery exhibit was a collection of 16 lithographs by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. The 16 lithographs are from the Suite 1 series dated 1970. Suite 1 consists of tightly packed squares of short vertical pencil strokes.

The Illustration

To illustrate this post I've used the digital painting Lift Off which I completed last spring but am only now adding to my web site. My choice of colors and brush style for this piece are meant to impart to the viewer something of the exuberance of witnessing the launch of a space ship. The model for Lift Off was a NASA photograph of a Space Shuttle launch. To view larger versions of this picture, and for additional information, see Lift Off

Ad Astra, Jim

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Art and Artists, Art Shows, Space Art.