The Bad Art Cafe

Ceres (1930)

">She sits on top of the Board of Trade, down LaSalle St. in Chicago. You can see for almost miles around because she's up so high - 300 feet, and counting. She's an Art Deco statue of Ceres, the Goddess of Grain, and you can't make out her detailing, but she's all percision made curves and sleek angles, a featureless face, a stylized Roman gown and crown of wheat, sitting on a platform of four small stairs. Sculpted by John Storrs, a student of Rodin, Ceres was planned in France, and shipped to Chicago in forty pieces, and assembled so we can see her in all her glory for the past seventy-four years. She's one of my favorites in city of well known sculptures. More later on the (Untitled) Sounding Sculpture.

How Bruno Once Sold a Painting

it was an easy sell

Bruno met a yuppie married woman in the chic part of town who wanted an original painting in unstretched canvas with color satuaration, and maybe flowers.

this was Bruno's specialty.

so she painted the painited to order

then realized she didn't get the lady's name, phone number or address, she just had a general idea where she lived.

so Bruno picked the block they met on and went door to door to all these new row houses, and asked, did you order a painting, did you order a painting, did you order a painting, for a bout an hour.

finally, she located the lady in question, brought the painting over, unrolled it at her feet, and was paid $1,000.00 for it on the spot.

and just in case anyone cares, Art Chicago is becoming a whole big new affaire this year. the tickets are $20.00, not $15.00, but there are more exhibits and dealers to visit, which I can't imagine, as Art Chicago, though great, makes my head hurt with just one exhabition. more later. it's in late April

Happy 1st Friday - so, my philosophy is

So, my philosophy is, just so everyone in artblog land can get it, I am first & foremost a CREATIVE WRITER, and second, an art person. My blog is purposely written in a flash dance kinda of way because that is the way it is actually written in about 2 seconds. But I can assure you, it is thought out and researched meticulously, in other words, the facts are not made up or exaggerated.

versailles, chicago

there's a piece of versailles in chicago's downtown, open only a few months out of the year.  it's called the clarence buckingham fountain (1927) (georgina pink marble & bronze) (east of columbus drive. at the foot of congress parkway)

it's one of those famous chicago attractions that people forget is actually an outdoor sculpture.  I forgot it was an outdoor sculpture, just like the bronze men on their horses, or beautiful women depicting the 5 great lakes as a fountain.  I read about it in the loop sculpture guide. 

a long time ago in chicago's history, french sculptor marcel francious layou (1895 - 1929) won a (grand) prix national in paris - like a car racing contest for artists - in 1927 for his bronze fountain heads. the idea stolen from a part of the grand garden in versailles.  cast in france & meant to symbolize the great lakes too, because they are great, you know, there are four indentical pairs of 24 bronze sea horses.  it reciculates a half of a million gallons a day, at least.  it's big.

isn't that a refreshing to view on hot day in chicago, in the city, walking distance from the art institute of chicago, they have small fences around it, or you know everybody'd be taking their shoes & playing in it, and might lose of it's grand prix look.

it's big, and looks gloomy in the winter when the fountain is turned off and big sheets cover the bronze sea horses.

I was reduced to

I was reduced to pilfering through trace’s belongings out in the courtyard;

it was a miserable way to end a once great friendship. Trace had left a box of some great finds, things I could use in my new apartment where there wouldn’t be jack shit if it wasn’t for trace. I inherited one of the chairs too. All I had was a bed & some books, a lotta books. But all of trace’s material stuff meant nothing to her in the end when she abandoned all hope of living in chicago for the rest of her life. She went back home to live with her p’s, and she was hauling ass to get out of here

First Friday – Bell Street Studio

Bell Street Studio, Chicago, Illinois, c. 1990. Brenda Bruno, Chicago back drop painter and general large canvas creator, my former boss, found it deep in the heart of West Town by walking all over in a snow storm with a baby and looking for aerial shots, from the ground, of skylights.

Untitled Sounding Sculpture

Untitled Sounding Sculpture (1975)

Harry Bertoia (1915 – 1978)
Copper-beryllium, brass and granite
16 feet a highest point
200 E. Randolph St., Chicago, Illinois

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, there was this big hole in the ground from the construction of a big building. Next to the Sounding Sculpture, you used to go and look at this “installment” as a teenager to get away from the horrible noise of the downtown. Although horrible noise is everywhere in the big city, this place had almost a Zen like peacefulness about it. It’s where you went and you were stoned, or zoned, or out of it, and the wind was blowing, and you were usually stoned, out of it, or otherwise zoned, and the wind is always blowing in Chicago, so you could go there anytime.

It looks like brass stems all lined up in a row. A lot of rows. The sound it makes is vaguely like a harp, The look is pretty mid-seventies “conceptual.”

Ceres (1930)

She sits on top of the Board of Trade, down LaSalle St. in Chicago. You can see for almost miles around because she's up so high - 300 feet, and counting. She's an Art Deco statue of Ceres, the Goddess of Grain, and you can't make out her detailing, but she's all percision made curves and sleek angles, a featureless face, a stylized Roman gown and crown of wheat, sitting on a platform of four small stairs. Sculpted by John Storrs, a student of Rodin, Ceres was planned in France, and shipped to Chicago in forty pieces, and assembled so we can see her in all her glory for the past seventy-four years. She's one of my favorites in city of well known sculptures. More later on the (Untitled) Sounding Sculpture.

Vegetarian Special, (1st Friday)

(c.1991)
I think it was at the point where North Avenue and Milwaukee meet at a sharp angle. It was a little fast food restaurant, or diner, or something that sold us, designer/artists down the street, a thing called a “vegetarian special”. It consisted of a grilled American cheese on pita bread with lettuce, tomato and hot pickled peppers and a side of fries. It was Desiree Delacroix’s brilliant streak of genius that created the sandwich – the die-hard vegetarian of the crowd. The cost was $2.00, and sometimes, when things weren’t selling for anybody, $2.00 was about all you could spend on lunch.

The Artists finally have some say in the urban landscape.

Went back to school. School is Columbia College Chicago and they are taking over more and more of the storefront properties in the South Loop and turning them into student art galleries.

The South Loop has always been a run down part of Chicago dating back to the Haymarket Riots in the late Nineteenth Century, and the homeless shelters and men’s only rooms from the Great Depression. Small liquor stores, pawn shops, and Columbia College on south Michigan Avenue.

Columbia is an oasis of art culture, not just in the South Loop, but to the whole of Chicago. Chicago is a town of stock market traders, bankers, and business people. Artists used to routinely attend school here and then more to New York. Which left us with nothing.

Store fronts – gallery space, colorful new art attitude all over the place The Museum of Contemporary Photography was always housed in the main building of Columbia, (600 S. Michigan, at Harrison), but now it truly feels you’ve slipped into another timezone, a twilight place where everyone is creative, not a business person in the Loop. The Artists finally have some say in the urban landscape. Because it’s only been a 100 years or more since they imposed a neo-classical structure on Chicago (the World’s Fair, 1893), and the image stuck, moribund in time.