Available Sept. 12, 2015, at the Lakewood Balmoral Yard Sale As usual, I’ll be selling at the jumbo Lakewood Balmoral neighborhood yard sale this year. It’s a great sale with lots of houses participating. I have lots of new stuff to haul out, including a ton of music. Find me on the 5600 block of North Magnolia. Here’s a list of some of the best records: LPs & 45s 10CC: Sheet Music $3 4 Vagabonds: Yesterday’s Memories (Relic) $4 5 Royales: Laundromat Blues (Relic) $3 801: Live $3 Al Green: Gets Next To You $10
Continue readingCategory: Art
Stanley Szwarc in Color
Many of Stanley Szwarc’s earliest boxes, from the 1980s, were painted, mostly with some kind of spray paint. For a time it appears he stopped using color, since most boxes from the late 1980s on were unpainted, at least on the outside. But sometime in the 1990s he created a steady stream of boxes with a thick enamel applied to create colorful patterns on top of the metal ornamentation that was on all his work. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases The Stanley Szwarc boxes 2016 show at Intuit
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The Stanley Szwarc Boxes
Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011) was a prolific artist, and boxes were his most frequent creation. There are thousands of these floating around the Chicago area, ranging from tiny ones barely a couple of inches wide to bruisers that could take up the corner of a desk. In his basement were closets and trunks filled with layers of boxes stacked up and divided by sheets of cardboard. “No two alike,” he would always say. As with all his work, the ornamentation is brilliantly creative. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases Stanley
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Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Vases
Vases by Stanley Szwarc, master of stainless steel, who died in 2011. Stanley complained that his vases took too much effort to make, but he kept creating them nonetheless. They are among his most elegant works. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery Visit the Stanley Szwarc portrait gallery The Stanley Szwarc boxes Stanley Szwarc in color 2016 show at Intuit in Chicago Read The Stanley Szwarc story
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Stanley Szwarc Portrait Gallery
Stanley Szwarc’s most typical creations are marvels of decoration, stainless steel boxes lathered in abstract ornamentation. But he also applied his geometric talent to creating faces, some ominous, some cartoony, some robotic, and some quite dressy. When the book keeper turned metal worker took up representational imagery, his imagination was stunning. Recently acquired early work Visit the Stanley Szwarc visionary cross gallery View Stanley Szwarc’s vases The Stanley Szwarc boxes Stanley Szwarc in color 2016 show at Intuit in Chicago Read The Stanley Szwarc story
Continue readingShort Review: A New American Picture
This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” books, or more accurately, “I kind of thought of that but never got around to doing it” books. Doug Rickard travels the country via Google Street View and creates a virtual street photography from the massive library of automatically generated images. Rickard gravitates to images of more or less distressed locations that include people, which means he is drawing from a small percentage of available pictures. I’m impressed with the patience this must require. As the book notes, his approach lets him show places he’s never been and would
Continue readingShort Review: David Plowden’s A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America
David Plowden’s photos in A Handful of Dust: Disappearing America are marvelously evocative as always. His introductory text moves them to a dimension beyond ruin porn. Usually when you see pictures of rural decay you respond to that evocativeness and to the formal beauty of the scenes. Plowdwn connects you to the stories behind these mostly Midwestern images in the same way that he’s connected, by talking about what these places (and the people who once populated them) were like when he first photographed them years ago. There really is a narrative behind almost every ruined farmhouse or boarded-up store.
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Stanley Szwarc’s Visionary Cross Purposes
Stanley Szwarc (1928-2011), a Polish book keeper turned metal worker and then artist after arriving in the United States, gave no indication of being particularly religious, but he did like making crosses. A prolific creator of objects from scrap stainless steel, always demonstrating over-the-top imagination, Szwarc made hundreds of crosses, if not thousands. He produced jewelry, he made crosses to be hung on the wall, and he crafted cruciform objects with no apparent use other than to be carriers of his endless combinations of geometric shapes. Szwarc liked to say that no two of his objects, be they crosses, vases, key fobs or boxes, were alike. The evidence plainly supports that contention while demonstrating a virtuosic artistic vision
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