Author: Ron Scott Page 11 of 26

Extraordinary Gift @ Detroit Institute of Arts

On May 17, 2019

In Assemblage / Collage, Paintings, Prints, Sculpture

Horned Mask, early 1900″s, Unknown Artist, Wood, Natural Fiber, Kaolin, Fang Culture, Gabon

Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift: The exhibition focuses on the patronage and recent bequest of art from the late Margaret Herz Demant. This exhibition celebrates her gift of artworks to the museum’s permanent collection, and her passion for African and modern Western art. Demant collected these pieces with the sole purpose of enhancing the DIA’s world-class art collection, purposefully purchasing art to fill in gaps within the various departments

Margaret Herz Demant in her living room surrounded by her collection. Image Courtesy Patricia Beck / Detroit Free Press

The exhibition displays 35 works in a variety of media, by artists of different cultural and historical backgrounds with a wide range of relevance to the DIA’s collection of African art, modern Western works and prints and drawings. African works dominate in the exhibition with a total of 24 pieces, representing Margaret’s primary passion and the majority of the bequest. Other pieces of the exhibition include an etching by Pablo Picasso among other drawings and prints, a painting by French artist Jean Dubuffet and 3-D works by French artist André Breton and American artist Joseph Cornell.

“The Solitary One,” 1955, Jean Dubuffet, French, paint on canvas.

Demant joined the DIA in the early 1960s, becoming a member of the board of trustees, a patron, benefactor, and a dedicated volunteer before her death on May 20, 2018. As an experienced interior designer and lifetime collector, she viewed her collection as an integral part of her home’s décor. While the quality of her pieces showcased her incredible eye and taste, her use of art within her home spoke to her sophistication. “Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift” attempts to recapture her personal approaches to collecting and experiencing art.

Joseph Cornell, Speed of Light #2, Collage and Oil on Board, 1969

“Margaret, a devoted supporter of the DIA, was an astute collector whose enthusiasm for art and its display was contagious,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA Director. “The works in this gift will enhance our already world-class collection and enrich the lives of the residents of southeast Michigan. This is a gift to the community in which she lived and thrived.”

Pablo Picasso, Four Nude Women and Sculpture Head, from the Vollard Suite

Extraordinary Eye, Extraordinary Gift at the Detroit Institute of Arts through May 26, 2019, and then dispersed through-out the collection.

Corine Vermeulen @ David Klein Gallery

By Ron Scott

On April 14, 2019

In Paintings, Photography, Prints

Corine Vermuelen, Installation image, 2019, courtesy of DAR

Photography is front and center in the exhibition, by the Dutch artist Corine Vermeulen at the David Klein Gallery’s contemporary art gallery on Washington Boulevard in Detroit, Michigan. The exhibition is a collection of two separate bodies of work, one more grounded in her previous work depicting street portraits. In this new figurative-based work, Nachtwerk, mostly shot at night, the figurative images are integrated in what might be called surreal elements.

In a statement, the artist says, ” I am intervening retrospectively in my own image making, doing something different with the images of the past. This occurs during a time of ‘revival’ in Detroit when different processes are deployed over the same terrain, interfering with the historical round.”

Corine Vermeulen, 00:25, August 14, 2018- 2018, Pigment print, 40 x 30 inches, Edition 1 of 5

Corine Vermeulen, 12:17, August 20, 2018- 2018, Pigment print, 26 2/3 x 20 inches, Edition 1 of 5

Corine Vermeulen, ISON (Belle Isle)- 2018, Pigment print, 42 x 42 inches, Edition 1 of 5

The second body of work, Kodak and the Comet, the photography is comprised of large colorful abstract images. The idea of creating an abstract photographic image has been around dating back to artists experimenting with contact sheet photography, and more recently been executed by Frances Seward, Alexander Jacques, Ola Kolehmainen, and Graham Crumb, but these artists were capturing abstraction in natural environments where they are looking at their subject through the lens and taking an exposure.

What is different in these Vermeulen abstracts is that she is taking her existing film negatives (2.25 x 2.25”) and applying chemicals that move and distort the layers of color within the existing emulsion. (Spoiler alert: Not all images are created using digital technology.) This is why you see the numerals along the edges that help differentiate one negative from the next, something only found at the edges of the film. The end result could be achieved by trial and error, selecting a more desirable image, perhaps overlapping a negative or reworking the negative chemically until the required results are obtained. She may then possibly scan her negative and move into the digital printing process. To gain the size and scale of these prints, the artist needs to use a large digital printer where the photographic paper comes on a roll, and these kinds of sizes are obtainable. Vermeulen uses her existing color negatives as the vehicle to produce her lush and beautiful colorful abstractions.

Corine Vermeulen, Q2 (Gratiot)- 2018, Pigment print, 42 x 42 inches, Edition 1 of 5

These organic manifestations of shape and color are manipulations of existing negatives, exposed slightly in the backgrounds be it landscape or cityscapes. Vermeulen has taught herself what drops of chemicals create certain colors in the emulsion. Regardless of how the work is created, it is an appealing type of abstract expressionism on its own.

Corine Vermelulen, 209P/LINEAR (Belle Isle)- 2019 Pigment print 84 1/2 x 98 inches Edition of 5

Many of the images are 42 x 42 inches, but in the large 209/LINEAR (Belle Isle) image, the square is divided up into eight related negatives creating an 84 x 98-inch image against the back wall of the gallery illustrating the factor of scale as it demonstrates the possibilities. These images are organic and poetic both in shape, form and color.

Corine Vermeulen is a photographer who set up her studio practice in Detroit in 2006 shortly after earning her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was selected as a Kresge Artist in 2009. She is known for her long-term, immersive projects portraying resilient urban communities amid reinvention. Her photographs have been featured in The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Time Magazine, The Guardian and The Fader, among others. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at national and international venues, including a solo exhibition at The Detroit Institute of Arts: The Walk-In Portrait Studio (2015), and group exhibitions Constant as the Sun at MOCA Cleveland (2017), and This Land at Pier 24 in San Francisco (2018).

Lester Johnson @ David Klein Gallery

Lester Johnson, Three Women II. Oil on Canvas, 60 x 50, 1973

Established in 1990 as a gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, David Klein opened with both contemporary exhibitions and a specialty in Post War American Art. On his 25th anniversary in September of 2015, he began a second location in downtown Detroit devoted to contemporary art and continued with his Birmingham space dedicated to his thirty-two Post War American artists. The American artist Lester Johnson’s work has been part of Klein’s compendium from early on and Klein recently opened an exhibition of his artwork March 16, 2019.

Lester Johnson was born January 27, 1919, in Minneapolis and after high school began an apprenticeship at the Cosmopolitan Art Company where he learned to copy calendar landscapes. Determined to be an artist he studied at the Minneapolis School of Art, then transferred to the Chicago Art Institute. Johnson left for New York City. After living in a variety of locations and studios, he established a studio space on the Bowery and ended up sharing a studio with Phillip Perlstein on 10th street. He eventually accepted an offer by Jack Tworkov to teach at Yale where he was able to work as an artist and raise a family in Milford, CT.

Lester Johnson(right) with Willem DeKooning, 1971

Perhaps no decade in the history of American art continues to generate quite so much debate as the 1950s, when the United States, and in particular New York City, supplanted Europe as the primary focus of international attention. The success of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline represented a kind of cultural coming of age in America at precisely the moment when the country’s military and economic fortunes seemed brightest. As a figurative expressionist and member of the Second Generation of the New York School, painter Lester Johnson remained dedicated to the human figure as means of declaration through the many stylistic changes of his body of work. In his formative years Lester Johnson was in the thick of the zeitgeist. It’s what informs the passion, energy, and enduring power of those early primitive works. There was angst and reckless risk taking. There was something demonic in the frenzied execution of the early heads and figures. Taking from the Abstract Expressionists he painted from the shoulder in broad, messy, drippy strokes as if Lester was striving to find the essence of universal man.

In a 2004 review Hilton Kramer approached the work as “…some painters have made it a fundamental tenet of their art to resist the templates of their own facility. Rather than aiming for ease of expression they deliberately cultivate certain obstacles to it, either through distortion in draftsmanship or by creating a facture that eschews suavity in favor of a distressed painterly surface. Figurative painters who came of age in the heyday of Abstract Expressionist aesthetic were especially likely to play a role in this effort to undermine the effects of facility.”

In New York, Johnson exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, and James Goodman Gallery as well as having been included in group shows at the Guggenheim, The Whitney, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lester Johnson, Classic Figure #2, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 49″ 1965

David Klein is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) a non-profit membership organization of the nation’s leading galleries in the fine arts. Founded in 1962, ADAA seeks to promote the highest standards of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice within the profession. ADAA members deal primarily in paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs from the Renaissance to the present day. Each ADAA member is an experienced and knowledgeable dealer in their field. ADAA has nearly 180 member galleries in 29 U.S. cities.

Lester Johnson: A Centennial Exhibition, at David Klein Birmingham, runs through April 27, 2019

Mary Ann Aitken @ Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center

By Ron Scott

On March 19, 2019

In Paintings

Installation Image, Mary Ann Aitken, Indomitable Spirit, BBAC, All Images Courtesy of DAR, except Maureen Aitken.

The exhibition of work by Mary Ann Aitken, Indomitable Spirit, opened at the BBAC in the Robinson Gallery on March 8, 2019, providing many viewers with a first time look at the Detroit artist who painted her expressionistic landscapes and still life work during the 1980s from her studio in the Cary Building in downtown Detroit at Gratiot and Broadway.

“It is a privilege to showcase a small sample of Mary Ann Aitken’s work. The exhibit demonstrates the rawness and emotional underpinnings of a lifelong artist and an art therapist.” Annie VanGelderen, BBAC president and CEO said for this review, “As you examine the deliberate and urgent paint strokes, one can feel the energy and need that Mary Ann had to document a moment of her time.”

Aitken was born in Detroit in 1960 and attended Wayne State University where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts and maintained her art practice in Detroit, exhibiting locally, until she moved to New York City in 1989. Her second master’s degree in Art Therapy provided her employment at the Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn where she assisted her patients through their medical struggles using the art process. Aitken shared her talent through art therapy in the decades that followed and continued to exhibit her work around the Detroit Metro area. She passed away after a long, four-year battle with cancer in Brooklyn in 2012. Her close friend, Detroit artist, Ed Fraga, recipient of the 2009 Kresge Arts fellowship for visual arts, has shepherded her work in and around Detroit since her passing and acted as liaison for a joint exhibition at Trinosophes and What Pipeline in 2013.

Fraga says, “Mary Ann had a keen eye for illuminating scenes of Detroit and everyday objects in her studio through her unique palette and style of painting. She dared to paint floral images on the daily newspaper, testing the boundaries of permanence, and now 35 years later as the paper has yellowed the paint still remains.”

Mary Ann Aitken, Untitled (Broadway), Oil on Masonite, 1985-89

There is something in this work that draws this painter to the way Aitken handles the spontaneous use of paint while capturing a strong composition. This aerial looks down on Broadway in a way that speaks to an intuitive approach to the use of space that dominates her sensibility. She blocks in the expanse without concern about representation, exposes the brush marks and, in this work, plays with the strength in a parallelogram and the use of black line.

Mary Ann Aitken, Untitled, (Gratiot & Broadway), Oil on Masonite, 1985-89.

Here again, Aitken is working from an elevated point of view and flirts with a naïve impression, yet there is nothing primitive about this streetscape. This brown boulevard dominates the composition with aesthetically raw, textured layers of paint, while paying little attention to the rendering of the trees. Here, Aitken’s work moves more toward abstraction than expressionistic streetscape.

Mary Ann Aitken, Untitled, (Projector), Oil on Masonite, 1985-89

The Aitken exhibition demonstrates her interest in still life and ordinary objects as in The Projector that uses an object to paint an expressionistic abstraction with the focus on composition and the application of paint. She is dividing the rectangle with an object, not worried about representation, or color, but with concern for shape, line, and space. Aitken is using the object to facilitate her abstraction.

Mary Ann Aitken, Untitled (flower pot) Oil, sand, mounted on canvas, 1985-2011

She does this again with her still life, Untitled (flower pot),with an emphasis on black line and frame. In both these still-lifes her touch is heavy, with thick layers of paint that create these unmediated impressions of these objects, whether a projector or a potted flower. Aitken experimented with substrates for her oil painting, including canvas, wood, and Masonite. An example would be the (flower pot) where she adds either pumice or sand to the thick black oil paint border. It is interesting that this painting is an example of where the artist returns to her 1980 motif and applies heavy paint to canvas. She is quoted as saying, “Art is a part of my life—it belongs to me. No one can take that away from me.”

Mary Ann Aitken, Untitled, (view from Cary Building fire escape), Oil on Canvas, 1985-89

Grabbing a view from the Cary Building using foreground, mid-ground, and background, the city becomes her grid-like painting for her sublime abstraction. Having gone to Wayne State University and studied under Robert Wilbert, there is no question she was influenced by artists Nancy Mitchnick, Michael Lukes, and Gordon Newton, but this writer is a little tired of various entities trying to capitalize on the overly used term “Cass Corridor Artist.” I say this because I graduated from the WSU graduate program in painting in 1971 and had a studio in Detroit, but I would never use that term to describe my work, and many artists would fit my profile. I am sure Aitken was there and influenced by all of it in a positive way, but also remember that she left for New York City in 1989 in search of greener pastures, much like John Egner. Is it a coincidence they both return to Detroit, Aitken posthumously and respected, and Egner with his Cass Corridor repute?

As part of the exhibition, Mary Ann Aitken’s sister, Maureen Aitken attended a talk at the BBAC where she read from her book, The Patron of Lost Girls, in first person stories about her resilience in the face of injustice growing up in Detroit where the recession hit hard on Midwest families. She gives the name Megan in her story, as her sister’s name, representing Mary Ann, who provided the audience with a glimpse of family dynamics while traveling on the road and mentions her sister’s devotion to her artwork. Maureen Aitken teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Mary Ann Aitken has had Posthumous solo shows at Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; What Pipeline, Detroit; Trinosophes, Detroit; and Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI. Group exhibitions include Greene Naftali, NYC; Andrew Kreps, NYC (with Dylan Spaysky), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Tomorrow Gallery, NYC; Marianne Boesky, NYC; Marlborough Chelsea, NYC; and PSM Gallery, Berlin. Her work is in the collections of Wayne State University, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Mary Ann Aitken, Indomitable Spirit, at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center runs through April 18, 2019.

Rosen & Binion @ Cranbrook Art Museum

By Ron Scott

On January 20, 2019

In Ceramic, Drawing, Paintings, Sculpture

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped and McArthur Binion: Binion/Saarinen, opens at the Cranbrook Art Museum

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped (installation view), 2017. Photo by Gary Zvonkovic. Courtesy the artist and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

McArthur Binion, Binion/Saarinen: I, 2018, oil paint stick and paper on board, Courtesy Modern Ancient Brown

Two Cranbrook MFA graduates, Annabeth Rosen (81) and McArthur Binion (73), have returned to the Cranbrook campus at the Cranbrook Art Museum (CAM) as seasoned artists with exhibitions that provide a platform to exemplify their accomplishments. The exhibition opened November 17^th, 2018 and runs to March 10, 2019, easily utilizing the spacious galleries, especially the Annabeth Rosen exhibit, which is nothing less than mammoth in its scope.

I’ve written about McArthur Binion before and seen his work representing the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017, so when this exhibition first came to my attention, I assumed Binion would be my focus. But the exhibition of his work here at CAM is modest in comparison to the work of Rosen in both the Main and the Larson galleries. Her work is the artist’s first major museum survey that archives more than twenty years of work. A critically acclaimed pioneer in the field of ceramics, Rosen brings a deep knowledge of the material’s history and processes to the realm of contemporary art.

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped (installation view), 2018. Photo by Detroit Art Review.

Rosen’s work is curated by Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston’s senior curator, Valerie Oliver, and surveys two decades of her ceramic additive work that has a derivative aspect found in abstract expressionistic art. Her studies at Cranbrook under Artist in Resident Jun Kaneko encouraged her to experiment with non-functional forms and separate her work from the traditional role of ceramics as functional craft. Much of Rosen’s work is assembled with already-fired broken parts which have been reassembled, re-glazed, and ultimately re-fired, adding wet clay to the process.

Rosen says, “I work with a hammer and chisel, and I think of the fired pieces as being as fluid and malleable as wet clay.”

Annabeth Rosen, Fired and glazed ceramic, Bundle, and rubber ties.

The ceramic work is divided up into categories: Mash Ups, Bundles, Mounds and Drawings. Some of the Mounds are bound together by wire, and others are smaller shapes (Bundles) that have been bound using rubber that might be made from a bicycle inner tube. Rosen began vertically stacking these bundles of ceramic and mounting them on a steel frame set on four wheels. Rosen has developed an acute interest in non-functional ceramic forms as abstract expressionistic sculpture along with painterly compositions of paint on paper.

Annabeth Rosen, Paint on paper, 2014

It would be impossible to ignore the works on paper as a major force that directly relates to the ceramic work. These compositions that are constructed with a gestural stroke are both studies and stand-alone work that underpins a philosophical and conceptual driven force behind her sense of creation. The process in the drawing and ceramic work reveals her hand is symbiotic, where one influences the other. Rosen seems to muster strength in her drawings as inspiration and influence for the ceramic sculpture work that follows. All the drawings, which could easily be considered paintings, are created without the consideration of color and this seems to this viewer to place the emphasis on the compositional creation of line, movement, shape and space. All the work, ceramic and on paper, is a bi-product of her internal meditations and illustrates a unique utilization and application of materials, techniques and concepts.

Annabeth Rosen, Installation view, Fired and glazed ceramic, and steel baling wire.

Annabeth Rosen studied at Alfred University (BFA) and the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA), and has gone on to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1997 she holds the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis.

McArthur Binion, Binion/Saarinen: I, 2 – 2018, oil paint stick and paper on board, Courtesy Modern Ancient Brown

In Cranbrook Art Museum’s North Gallery, the Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion says that he had a note pinned to his wall for decades that read “Binion/Saarinen”,obviously something that came from his graduate studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art during the early 1970s. This idea is obviously generated from literally living on the campus and being surrounded by the Finnish architecture of Eliel Saarinen who immigrated to America in 1923 after the completion of the Chicago Tribune building in 1922 and who went on to be a visiting professor at the University of Michigan before developing the entire Cranbrook campus for George Booth. Perhaps it was the grids inherent in these architectural structures that made a deep impression on Binion, a Mississippi-born African American who developed his own visual language-based graphic elements, particularly circles and grids.

He says, “My work begins at the crossroads—at the intersection of bebop improvisation and Abstract Expressionism”, and at times he has described his work as rural Modernist.Binion uses oil stick, crayon and, more recently, laser-printed images to create his lushly textured and colored geometrically patterned works. The work in the Cranbrook exhibition is produced on board with small photo printed images as a background field for this tightly knit grid produced with hard pressed oil paint stick. These carefully measured grids and hand-done hatchings cover tiny images that usually have some personal meaning to the artist. In the past, the work often incorporated biographical documents, such as copies of his birth certificate or pages from his address book.

McArthur Binion, Binion/Saarinen: 2018, oil paint stick and paper on board, Courtesy Modern Ancient Brown

These new paintings use autobiographical photo imagery of both Saarinen and himself in their early thirties as a background for his delicate squared-off grid that could be easily described as minimalist abstraction from a distance. Upon close examination, this personal element attempts to bond the two together, at least from Binion’s perspective. In addition, the gallery space includes painting, drawings and furniture by Eliel Saarinen.

McArthur Binion’s paintings are largely symbolic and achieve an expressive resonance that defies the reductive materialism of minimalism. They are formed out of an unlikely confluence of influences, including such Modernist masters as Piet Mondrian, and Wifredo Lam, as well as his own southern African-American heritage, reflected in his mother’s quilts and West African textiles. Persistence and discipline fortifies Binion’s practice and his succinct, richly personal compositions.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.

Binion/Saarinen: A McArthur Binion Project is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum and curated by Laura Mott, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Design.

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped and McArthur Binion: Binion/Saarinen, at the Cranbrook Art Museum runs through March 10, 2019.

Bill Schwab @ Halsted Gallery

By Ron Scott

On December 8, 2018

In Photography

Detroit Photographer has a Survey Exhibition of Work at the Halsted Gallery

Installation, Bill Schwab talking at open, 2018

Photography celebrates its 180th anniversary in 2019. This art form has fascinated us from its early beginnings with its ability to record time and aide our memories of people, places and objects. Photographs are magical things, credited with the power to steal a person’s shadow and provide a mysterious interaction of silver and salt akin to alchemy. That was pre-digital era, of course.

If you are anywhere near my age (and studied art in the 1960s) you may have taken a class in photography in your college years. You may have purchased a Pentax, Cannon, or Nikon 35-millimeter single lens reflex (SLR) camera and exposed a series of rectangles that captured an image of your family, friends and possibly your pet. After loading the camera and recording images, you rolled your black-and-white Tri-X film back into its cannister, removed it in a darkroom under a mysterious red light, and developed the celluloid impressions, each producing a negative image. The negative was then placed into a photo enlarger which projected a lit image onto photo sensitive paper, usually Kodak or Afga, creating a sensation that when wiggled around in a developing solution, magically forms an image right before your eyes. Life’s moment became concentrated, condensed and captured in a split second of time.

Bill Schwab, Metropolitan, Gum over Platinum Print, Detroit 2012

The Halsted Gallery was the only photo gallery in the Detroit metro area back in the early 1970s and, as part of the gallery archive, there are letters from photographers whom Tom Halsted represented, including: Henri Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Imogen Cunningham to name only a few. In the year 2000, the Halsted Gallery had an opening for Bill Schwab, who was then a young and emerging photographer. The exhibit included small prints made from long exposures in the early morning fog of Belle Isle, Detroit. I bought his small, beautiful 36-page book and a limited-edition signed print.

Bill Schwab, House on Dearborn Street, 30 x 40″ Pigment Ink print, 2016

Fast forward to December 1, 2018, where the Halsted Gallery, now under the ownership of Wendy Halsted Beard, has reopened in a new location and mounted an exhibition, Relative Importance, of Bill Schwab’s photography that covers his work for the past two decades, including his more recent digital, aerial and wet plate collodion photographs. As professional and artistic photography still exists in this world of “everyone is a photographer,” Bill Schwab has endured with a prodigious reputation that many admire and he rightly deserves. Just because we all have smart phone cameras doesn’t mean we can compose, acutely observe and most importantly understand light. Circumstantial light considers not only all the properties and behaviors of natural light, but also how that light interacts with the objects around (you), transforming those objects into light-shaping tools.

Bill Schwab, Van Road Stars, 30 x 40″, Pigment Ink print, 2017

The first digital camera was created by Steven Sasson of Eastman Kodak in 1975, but the first consumer products didn’t arrive until the late 1980s and early 1990s. It wasn’t until 2010 that digital cameras were integrated into smart phones and by 2003, digital cameras out-sold film cameras. According to Info Trends, 1.2 trillion photos were taken in 2017. The technological change has had a tremendous effect on photography and photographers, but that is not to say it hasn’t been a natural advancement of capturing an image. Schwab is a good example of how photographers have embraced the new technology and used its tools as leverage to produce new kinds work. The digital image Van Road Stars, is a good example of how the manipulation of light and exposure can produce a rather engaging image, in part due to scale and incredible detail.

Bill Schawb, Mack at Lennox, Pigmented Ink Print, Detroit, 2016

What makes this Mack at Lennox image interesting has nothing to do with the recording device, but rather the sensibility to light, color and thought. You end up asking yourself how odd is that? Was it an ice cream stand or a dairy shop? But the cow has horns making it either a he, or a she. Formal in its composition, he makes the print large, 30 x 40 inches, which adds to its strength as a photograph. And then there is the light. Where is the light source coming from? Did he set a light up high against the darkened sky? These considerations are what set an artist apart from your average snapshot taker..

Bill Schwab, Five Trees in a Field, Pigment Ink Print, Detroit, 2016

Bill Schwab was early to take an interest in drone technology, something that most professional photographers now consider a necessary tool. He has a series called the Human Stain, largely made up of a decade of images taken of crumbling farm houses in rural areas, but this aerial image is of five trees with low light shadows and tractor trails that become the marks of visual artists with respect to placement and composition. It provides the viewer with a different point of view of the landscape, something that painters have been doing for hundreds of years.

Bill Schwab, Tidal Flooding – Hofn, Silver Gelatin Print, Iceland, 2015

Photography captures reality in distinct ways that were rarely available to painters. There once was debate over whether or not photography is fine art? I am not sure when that got answered, but the answer is clear: yes and no. If you’re photographing a still life for a garden magazine or a car for a showroom brochure, it is commercial photography. But when you are making abstractions, as Andre Kertesz or Ernst Haas did, or capturing precious moments in time based on light and composition as Henri Bresson did, it is fine art. The difference might be analogous to the difference between illustration and painting, although in the case of Norman Rockwell, the debate drags on, at least in some critics’ minds.

Bill Schwab, Rouge Steel, Silver Gelatin Print, 1994

Beginning at an early age, Bill Schwab developed an interest in photography with his Kodak Brownie camera and a home darkroom kit he got from his father as a gift. Like they say, give a person a fish and it’s a meal for that day, teach him how to fish, and it’s a lifetime of meals. Photography is Bill Schwab’s life, and great photography is about the depth of feeling, not the depth of field.

Bill Schwab earned his B.F.A in photography from Central Michigan University and worked for a short while in NYC assisting commercial photographer Alen MacWeeney before traveling the world as a commercial photographer. He has taken students of photography on workshops to Iceland, founded the Northern Light Press and coordinates the Photostock Festival yearly each June, changing and influencing photographers in his path. He has published four books on his photography, and his work is part of many museum, corporate and personal collections.

Bill Schwab, Relative Importance, at the Halsted Gallery runs through January 30, 2019