Rural Musicians Forum closes the 2019 summer season with a multi-media performance showcasing an exciting collaboration between percussion performers, composers, and the celebrated American visual artist John Himmelfarb. This one-of-a-kind concert, taking place on Sunday, September 22, is the only performance that begins with the musical instrument being driven onto the stage.

Earlier this year, the award-winning Northern Illinois University students and faculty visited Mr. Himmelfarb’s vehicular KB-3 sculpture to build a collection of sounds through striking, scraping and bowing every part of the artwork.

For this special event, the RMF audience will witness a world-premiere of dozen works using Mr. Himmelfarb’s sculpture KB-3 as a musical instrument. This is also a unique opportunity to meet Mr. Himmelfarb and get familiar with his idiosyncratic, yet modernist-based work and his 5th artistic period called “Trucks.”

To add to the fun, some pieces will call for audience participation.

Bring your picnic chairs/blankets and join the Rural Musicians Forum for an unforgettable outdoor concert at the beautiful Wyoming Valley School Cultural Arts Center, located at 6306 State Hwy 23, Spring Green. Grounds open at 2 PM and music begins at 2:30 PM. Drinks and food will be available for purchase.

Please visit ruralmusiciansforum.org for tickets. Free entry for students with valid ID and children 12 and under. Rain shelter available if needed. To learn more about the Himmelfarb Project, visit himmelfarbproject.com. This project is made possible in part by funds provided by the Spring Green Area Arts Coalition and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

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Himmelfarb is one of the most respected artists of the Midwest. His work spans virtually all mediums, including painting, drawing, and printmaking, as well as sculptures in metals, ceramics, and found objects. His current and continuing series of works focuses on trucks as a subject. In Himmelfarb’s own words, “These works are not about trucks but about us, our histories, skills, coping mechanisms, ambitions and character.” The Atrium will exhibit a number of his larger sculptures, while the 3rd floor galleries will present smaller sculptures and wall-mounted work. The exhibition will also include one of Himmelfarb’s “life-sized” truck sculptures, such as Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain, a 1946 Chevrolet farm truck that has been converted into a mobile sculpture.

The show will be complemented by the 124-page book, John Himmelfarb: Trucks: Recent Works, published in 2014. This exhibition has been sponsored in part by the Martin/Seamster Fund.

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At first glance, maybe it looks like a jalopy broke down in front of the Sioux City Art Center, but that’s just Penelope — and her creator wouldn’t be too happy if someone hauled her away.

John Himmelfarb, a Chicago artist, converted the teal-cabbed 1946 Chevrolet 2.5-ton farm truck into a mobile sculpture, heaped high with a rusting pile of junk.

Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain is the most visible work in his exhibition, Trucks, which opens with a free public reception from 5-7 p.m. Saturday at the Sioux City Art Center, 225 Nebraska St. Himmelfarb will give a gallery talk about his paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at 6 p.m.

Several of his larger sculptures will be displayed in the atrium while smaller sculptures and wall-mounted works will be in the third floor galleries through Oct. 23.

Here’s what you need to know before you go:

1. Himmelfarb is driven by the captivating visual qualities of trucks.

Himmelfarb has been making art for nearly 50 years. His earlier works varied in style and subject matter, featuring abstracts, pictographs and calligraphic marks. Around 2003, trucks became the central focus of his new works and he began making more sculptures.

“I’ve drawn trucks since as long as I can remember,” he said. “I came across a drawing I did when I was about 8 years old, and it had trucks in it. In the past, a lot of my works have had a variety of objects in them, but there were lots of them and small. So there might be a plane or a cup of coffee or a house and a cloud. A lot of different things. There were trucks among those, but the truck was never the main subject.”

2. You can think what you want.

“People want to know what my work means,” he said. “I just go with my gut feeling and worry about what it might mean, if anything, at a later date.

“I want people who look at my work to feel free to think about it on their own terms and figure out what it might mean to them. What they bring to it and what they take away from it is a personal matter. There’s not a right or wrong answer. They don’t have to figure out what I was thinking about because I wasn’t thinking about anything, except the forms and the shapes and the colors and some visual excitement.”

3. The truck outside the Sioux City Art Center came with a name.

Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain is the third life-size truck sculpture created by Himmelfarb. When he purchased the Chevy, the previous owner told him that the truck’s name was Penelope and she would run better if he talked to her.

Like taking home a traumatized pound puppy, Himmelfarb figured he better not change the name. Penelope’s life had been tough enough. Her name wasn’t all bad, either. In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Penelope is the clever, virtuous wife of Odysseus, who waited over 20 years for him to return home. The second half of the sculpture’s title gives a nod to the late John Chamberlain, a famed sculptor who often used scrap metal auto parts as a medium.

4. The truck sculptures are fairly eco-friendly.

Himmelfarb works with found objects and uses details of those objects to determine a color palette. For example, Penelope came with a teal cab and he didn’t change it. Instead, he brought more pops of the deep blue-green into other objects stacked onto the truck.

“I like using things that have been used before,” he said. “The less energy and toxic materials that are needed to make the whole thing, the better it is from my point of view.”

5. There are four other trucks like Penelope.

Penelope is actually part of a series of life-size sculptures built on real trucks.

The first, Conversion, was built on a 1949 International pickup. Marc LeBaron, chairman and CEO of Lincoln Industries, and his wife Kathy bought the piece and installed it on the company campus in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The second, Galatea, started with a 1948 REO Speedwagon. Contemporary art collectors Robert and Karen Duncan, also from Lincoln, bought this one and installed it in their sculpture garden. Penelope is the third truck, and there are two more, KB-3 and Remains.

6. Penelope still runs.

Himmelfarb took the engine out of the first truck, thinking museum curators wouldn’t want to deal with gas and oil leaking on their floors.

“I’ve since realized it’s a lot easier to leave it in,” he said. “Even if it’s going to be shipped on a trailer, at least you can drive it onto the trailer and off the trailer without having to tow it.”

She’s a little top-heavy, but Himmelfarb drove Penelope about 30 miles from his art studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin, to an outdoor exhibition site for Fermentation Fest, where farmers, chefs, artists, poets and cheese makers converge in the beautiful working lands of Sauk County with a series of tastings, demonstrations, cooking classes and art events.

7. Himmelfarb had a solo show at the Sioux City Art Center in 2000.

The exhibition, Floor to Ceiling, featured a lot of abstract works with an urban quality. He was inspired by city infrastructure like the iron work on bridges, cranes and railways. He experimented with layers of colors and patterns to create a series called Inland Romance. “It began to look like if you had built something elaborate out of Tinker Toys and taken it apart and left those parts around,” he said.

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Pushing the limits of artistic mediums, Chicago artist John Himmelfarb brings a new art exhibit, TRUCKS, to the plains. Consisting of sculptures, paintings, drawings and an actual truck, his exhibit is diverse and engaging for all ages.

One of the main eye-catching pieces from the exhibit is titled, Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain. It is constructed out of a 1946 Chevrolet truck, along with additional materials, and currently positioned in front of the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.

“The first time I drove Penelope at any distance was about 35 miles on rural roads, up big hills. I’ve driven through snow and ice to deliver the sculpture,” said Himmelfarb, according to ocm.auburn.edu.

“Truck drivers would come over to see what I was hauling pretty much everywhere I went. It generated a lot of conversation. People would stop and say ‘my grandfather had a truck like this one.’ People loved to have their pictures taken with it and would bring their kids.”

To demonstrate his techniques and passions, Himmelfarb was welcomed back to the Plains to complete another main piece located inside of the museum. The 35 feet long mural is titled Grace.

“These works are not about trucks,” Himmelfarb said. “But about us, our histories, skills, coping mechanisms, ambitions and character.”

According to RoGallery.com, Himmelfarb “has occasionally incorporated truck imagery in his work, usually in an ancillary role, or as a single character in larger, more complicated pieces. In more recent years, he has been using the image of a truck as the central organizing principle in his paintings, drawings, prints, and now in sculpture.”

To compliment the exhibit TRUCKS, the museum will pair it with a film series called FILM@JCSM: American Transport. This series will take place Thursday, Jan. 29 from 4 pm to 5:30 pm.

The second series linked to the exhibit, K-12 Art Club: Keep on Truckin’, will take place on March 15 at 1:30 pm.

Complementary tickets available and reservations are encouraged for each event. This exhibit will be held at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art from January 24-May 10, 2015.

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One group of second-grade students had a truck-themed school day Tuesday; however, there was no exhaust to smell, there were no horns to honk nor were there engines rumbling.

Second graders from the Auburn Early Education Center had the opportunity to visit Auburn University’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art to meet and interact with artist-in-residence John Himmelfarb , whose exhibition “TRUCKS” began Jan. 24 and will be on display through May 10.

In addition to asking Himmelfarb questions about his work, students watched as he worked on his 35-foot by 12-foot mural, Grace, in the museum’s Bill L. Harbert Gallery. Himmelfarb will be working on his installation mural in the gallery through Friday.

“To help the kids see the process of being an artist and see that art is important,” said Lauren Duncan, art teacher at AEEC. “It’s important in our community, and it’s meaningful in our society.”

Himmelfarb’s “TRUCKS” features works both two-and-three-dimensional works made from a variety of mediums including clay, lead, wood, steel, iron, acrylic paint, ink, crayon and unconventional materials, with trucks as an American icon at its core. Rather than depicting literal translations of trucks, Himmelfarb’s works evoke the individual personalities and purposes of trucks in an expressionistic style. The size of his works ranges from small drawings to life-sized actual trucks, such as his Penelope Awaiting her Chamberlain, created from a 1946 Chevrolet truck and found objects.

Penelope, currently situated for viewing on the museum lawn, was one of several works that students were able to view on Tuesday as they visited the museum.

“They’ll be going through all our exhibitions. We also have some works from our permanent collection on view,” Charlotte Hendrix, print and digital media producer for JCSM, said Tuesday. “And our docents will walk through with them and really encourage a conversation-style tour as opposed to just one person talking the entire time. It’s really a give-and-take, and that’s somewhat what John’s artwork is about. He enjoys engaging conversation, so that’s one of the reasons why he was able to come here and paint in public.”

Hendrix added that trucks are a relatable subject matter for the children.

“You’ll see a lot of the line and color — it’s very whimsical; it’s very fun,” she said. “And it’s something that they have a great familiarity with. Many of them play with trucks, or maybe their dad has a truck, or they’ll see them on a road trip. For the viewer, there is some kind of connection to truck, and that’s one of the reasons John has said he has chosen this as his subject matter, because it’s such an American icon.”

Himmelfarb, who is based in Chicago, said his decision to focus on trucks in his work was twofold.

“I think initially it was because they’re visually interesting,” Himmelfarb said. “The shapes, the colors, the textures—there’s a huge variety. When people think of trucks they tend to think of a tractor-trailer and a box behind it and they say, ‘What’s interesting about that?’ But when you actually start to look at the variety of vehicles out there, there’s a lot of lines and textures and colors, even if you just look at the back of the truck—all the old signs on it, lettering, hinges and door locks. You begin to find patterns and shapes that are interesting.”

In addition to being visually interesting, Himmelfarb explained how trucks are also a metaphor for people.

“After I worked with them for a while, I realized there was a hook of some sort that was more of an emotional hook to it,” he said. “Then I realized that handled in a certain way, they’re a metaphor for us. These works are not really about specific trucks. These are stand-ins for people for our experiences. So the variety in these trucks reflects the variety in our experiences.”

Duncan echoed Himmelfarb’s idea of trucks as a metaphor, adding that Himmelfarb’s expressionist style appealed to students.

“They love the theme of the trucks, they love the bright colors, and also I think they relate well to the way that John Himmelfarb works with his loose brushstrokes, very expressionist, lots of energy in his artwork,” Duncan said. “But the truck is so cool because it symbolizes more than just trucks. The truck is symbolic of people, and the things that are inside of the truck are symbolic of the things we carry with us and the burdens of all these different things. So it’s cool because it’s got the layer of fun, whimsical, colorful truck, but it’s also got a layer of very, very meaningful art.”

Himmelfarb painted Tuesday while students watched and asked questions. He said he intended to teach students about colors and lines and how they play into an overall design.

“I’m also trying to share with some of them the idea that in order to make something good, you have to be willing to make mistakes,” Himmelfarb said. “Otherwise, things don’t develop without making trials and errors. So I’m hoping they learn from that not to get frustrated if they’re making something and it’s not going right. They shouldn’t feel like they’re a failure. They should just keep going—just keep at it.”

Sarah Clark, 8, said that her visit to the museum did teach her that mistakes do not necessarily ruin an art piece.

“I enjoyed learning that John Himmelfarb doesn’t know what he’s about to paint,” Clark said. “He just starts painting, and then if he doesn’t like something, he paints over it.”

Andrew Hamner, 8, said he enjoyed the variety of truck elements that appear in Himmelfarb’s mural-in-progress.

“My favorite part was seeing all the different paintings crafted and knowing what they’re made of,” Hamner said. “I really liked how it had all sorts of different kinds of trucks features, like the ladder and the firetruck—all sorts of other things.”

Both Duncan and AEEC Principal Shelley Aistrup said that they were excited for the chance for their students to be able to interact with an artist first-hand and know that the art world is more accessible to them than they may think.

“Sometimes I think that when we talk about artists and poets and authors, children think that that’s something that’s unattainable to them, so I hope that this allows them to see that painters are real people, and this is something that they could strive for and accomplish in their lifetime as well,” Aistrup said.

“I just think the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art is a fabulous resource in our community, and I love getting to plan a trip to get my kids inside the museum, so they see it not as this marble building on a hill, but a place where they can come interact and learn and play,” Duncan added. “For them to interact with a real artist is a huge opportunity. So not only are they in the museum; they’re seeing this process, so it’s really cool.”

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Based in Chicago, John Himmelfarb is another artist for whom abstraction’s inherent ambiguity is its own reward. “My interest lies in the pure use of visual language without the baggage of imagery or narrative,” he says. As a result, some of his works appear to be primarily essays in expressive mark-making. Others, semi-abstract, are vigorous formal workouts that start with recognizable subjects — a face, an old camera, a swirling sea of everyday objects — whose shapes the artist reduces, contorts, explodes or obscures in rhythmic compositions or distorts with gusto.

Both of Himmelfarb’s parents were artists. His father was a regionalist painter who had studied at the Art Students’ League in New York; his mother focused on nature and architecture and, after a trip to Asia, produced images based on Arabic writing. “I grew up with books about modern art on the kitchen table,” Himmelfarb says. Jean Dubuffet and Mark Tobey are among the major modernists whose work interests him.

Himmelfarb has also been influenced by anthropology and calligraphy. “I respond to different kinds of mark-making systems,” he says. Like the epic novelists of the 19th century, he feels an urge to tell big stories through his art but also wants it to remain abstract. If that sounds like a conundrum, for Himmelfarb it also proposes an ambiguity-flavored solution. “Stories require settings,” he says, noting that his work may simply be seen as offering “a setting in which something happens.” Tiptoeing on the edge of figuration while driven by — and steeped in — an unshakable abstractionist’s impulse, Himmelfarb’s is an art of imminence and ever-shifting focus.

Juggernaut (2010), Riding High (1982), South Bank (1994)

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John Himmelfarb’s distorted doppelgängers of old trucks are almost painterly, belying their gravitational solidity. There seems to be a celebration of the workaday, the blue-collar, a lack of “fine” aesthetics. The barnacle-like forms, the weightiness, and the encrusted patina all reference an old worn-out vehicle. His work — like a truck that has outlived its use remains obstinately immobile, stubbornly useless. By comparison, the plywood sculpture Blue Motive is light and airy, as if leaving a window open to admit a warm summer breeze carrying the visual pun of the title and materials.

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In the past, John Himmelfarb — the Chicago born, bred and based working artist — has occasionally incorporated truck imagery in his work, usually in an ancillary role, or as a single character in larger, more complicated pieces. In more recent years, he has been using the image of a truck as the central organizing principle in his paintings, drawings, prints, and now in sculpture. The latter comprise the predominate work in this exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery.

In Himmelfarb’s world — somewhere between abstraction and figuration — the three bronzes, one large plywood sculpture, and the one wall-filling painting in the show are clearly identifiable as trucks. Rather rickety and tired from countless trips and loads, perhaps, but Himmelfarb captures the very essence of trucks. And with artistic wit and inventiveness in the line and form of his depiction, the truck imagery morphs into almost human physical attributes and attitudes in the viewer’s imagination. The artist’s titles for some of the pieces — Fortitude, Knowledge, Perseverance — suggest human virtues dating to the Aristotelian and Platonic tradition, and are clues to his intended anthropomorphism.

And what do trucks do? They carry stuff, and Himmelfarb’s are loaded. Perhaps a truck aficionado other than the artist will recognize a crane arm at rest, or the suggestion of a crank shaft, but most viewers will be content to categorize the cargo as a collection of forms suggestive of impedimenta, of “stuff” acquired and accumulated over time and experience, just in case. And for the Heads out there, it’s OK to assume that Himmelfarb’s wonderful work in this exhibition is a fitting nod of homage to “Truckin’.”

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Painter John Himmelfarb had been making prints for almost 40 years, but it wasn’t until Hudson Hills Press produced a catalogue raisonné of those prints in 2006 that the artist realized prints were an essential part of his career, generating 10 percent of his income selling art. A year after the catalogue was published, Himmelfarb bought a $17,000, 7′-x-4′ etching press that occupies a large portion of his Chicago studio.

“Now, when I have an idea or inspiration, I don’t need to rent a shop or wait to get invited by a publisher or university to do a print edition,” he says. He no longer has to pay $300 or more each day and be “creative on demand” during shop hours. “I’m on my own turf, and I can control the process more,” Himmelfarb explains. If sales continue as they have in the past, he figures, the printing press will pay for itself in one year. In the 1990s Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick bought a printing press for a few thousand dollars, and the cost was recouped within three months.

Sales of artist printing presses have increased sharply in the last decade, and a variety of factors are driving the move. There are fewer fine-art print studios, and those that remain are more expensive. “Many artists want to make prints in their own studios, rather than traveling somewhere to do it,” says Amber Millen, a saleswoman for Ettan Press Company, in La Jolla, California. Additionally, printmaking used to be associated with hazardous chemicals, but the new generation of materials features water-based inks and nontoxic solvents that make home-studio use less worrisome. For all artists, control is a major consideration.

Because most artists don’t want to deal with the massive presses used by commercial print publishers, manufacturers are producing lighter, less expensive machines. “I started out as a printmaker and engineer,” says Mel Whelan, the president of Whelan Press, a printing-press manufacturer in Santa Fe, “and I got tired of moving 1,800-pound presses through windows and doors.” Putting his engineering know-how to work, he developed a line of smaller presses that create full-size prints (22″ x 30″) and range from under 100 pounds ($1,495) to 396 pounds ($6,000). Whelan sells approximately 200 printing presses per year, and about half of those sales are to artists.

Artists represent only about 25 percent of the customer base of Takach Press Corporation, a manufacturer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but that is up about 50 percent over the past decade, according to salesman David Takach Jr. The bulk of Takach’s sales are large costly models to commercial printers and university print studios, but the company also makes smaller, lighter machines, such as a 250-pound press (18″ x 36″ and $3,875) that is a favorite of artists.

Dean Clark, the president of Printmakers Machine Company and Graphic Chemical & Ink Company, both based in Villa Park, Illinois, says his printing-press sales to individuals have also increased significantly. Many buyers make their purchases online, ordering tabletop and small table presses, the most popular of which weigh 55 pounds (9″ x 18″ for $675) and 90 pounds (12″ x 24″ for $1,405), as well as larger models weighing 270 pounds (18″ x 48″ for $2,840) and 550 pounds (27″ x 48″ for $4,400).

“We redesigned our presses a few years ago to be smaller, more stable and economical, suitable for someone’s home,” says a spokesman for Dick Blick Art Materials, the Galesburg, Illinois-based catalogue art-supply company, adding that the most popular presses are the most portable—one weighs 38 pounds (9″ x 18″ for $464) and another weighs 26 pounds (12″ x 24″ for $432). Similarly, just more than half of all printing-press sales for Jack Richeson & Co. in Kimberly, Wisconsin, are for its two “baby” presses—a 69-pounder manufactured in Brazil (12″ x 19″ for $475) and a 45-pound model made in Italy (71⁄4″ x 121⁄2″ for $350), according to Colleen Richeson, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing.

Daniel Smith, the Seattle-based catalogue art-supply company that sells Ettan, Jack Richeson & Co., and Whelan printing presses, as well as printmaking supplies, have many customers who want a lightweight press for use outside of their studios, particularly at art fairs or workshops. “Artists in the educational market are interested in safety and durability for multiple-use instances, such as with students who have never done printmaking before,” says Christopher Ramsey of Daniel Smith’s educational services department. “Lightweight design and portability are also concerns in the educational market, where presses may only be used a couple of times a week.”

Of course, not every artist who purchases a printing press has a success story to tell. After purchase one must learn or know how to etch or make a lithographic image on a printing plate, operate a printing press, and find buyers. The inability to master any of these skills may make it difficult for the printing press to pay for itself in the future. However, the affordability and design of the new presses makes it possible for all artists to further develop their skills.

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The exhibition, John Himmelfarb: The Borrower’s Name, card catalog drawings, is scheduled from April 8-30, 2005 at Phyllis Stigliano Gallery, 62 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. The show will consist of an installation by John Himmelfarb of approximately two hundred drawings on library card-catalog cards, each measuring three inches by five inches. The works are dynamic, self-involved drawings from the collective unconsciousness that illuminate enormous diversity in the artist’s personal American abstract style. Each diminutive work revels as Himmelfarb’s diary entries of the moment using a surprising range of painterly treatment. At times, his drawings reference other artists’ work, organic art forms, or printed words on a card. The library catalog cards are loosely, sensitively, and powerfully drawn fragments, pictograms, entities — all souvenirs of the artist’s journeys.

Matt Freedman, who has written an insightful essay for an accompanying exhibition catalog, states ” … the artist is slyly having it both ways, for while Himmelfarb’s cards announce their presence as effluvia of a winsome and active imagination, then their collective appearance on a gallery wall reifies that imaginative play in this installation … “

John Himmelfarb has a concurrent exhibition, Gary, Indiana, a selection of his large abstract paintings, scheduled at Salena Gallery, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York.

Originally published by Westword (New Times, Inc.), Mar 18, 2004:

Bill Havu, director of his namesake William Havu Gallery, has taken an interesting observation and turned it into an excellent show. After noticing that many mid-career artists across the country were creating paintings inspired by abstract expressionism, Havu came up with Wet Paint, a marvelous group effort that examines the work of a trio of these neo-abstract expressionists.

Wet Paint could easily have been handled as three separate but related solos, and I do wish that Havu had done it that way. He would have only had to hang the space at the bottom of the stairs and opposite the information desk slightly differently, because otherwise, the three artists’ works are hung separately.

The show begins with visually luscious monochrome paintings by Denver’s Jeffrey Keith installed in the entry and the spaces immediately adjacent. Keith has had a long and successful career that goes back decades. In the 1980s, he was known for his funky found-object assemblages, but beginning in the ’90s, his abstract paintings came to the fore and those are what he’s best known for now.

The paintings in the Havu show represent a direct continuation of the things Keith exhibited a couple of years ago at Rule Gallery. In both bodies of work, Keith used rectangular shapes in essentially the same color arranged to form subtle mosaic-like patterns. This monochrome effect is something of an illusion, though, because Keith includes a rainbow of shades used sparingly as accents. For example, the oil-on-linen “Race Day” looks like a field of purpley gray, but there are also dashes of red, yellow, blue and other shades throughout.

In the spaces immediately adjacent to the Keiths are paintings by John Himmelfarb of Chicago. Though the two artists’ pieces are distinctly different, their styles work wonderfully together. In the window space is a group of Himmelfarb paintings jn which vaguely plant-like shapes are crowded across the picture plane. The palette is dominated by strong, clear colors.

In the space at the bottom of the stairs are the latest Himmelfarbs, which are more elaborate in composition than the earlier ones. In them, the artist has laid cartoon images of figures and inanimate objects on top of an abstract background. These newer paintings are very cool; in them, Himmelfarb consciously refers back to Philip Guston’s watershed work of the 1970s, which also combines cartoons and abstraction.

The last of the three artists in Wet Paint js New Yorker Michael Rubin, the most doctrinaire abstract expressionist of the group. Rubin’s paintings are all-over abstractions made of what appear to be thousands of evenly spaced brush strokes. The paint has been thickly applied and rises high off the canvases in a regular pattern of juicy pigment mounds. Milton Resnick, a New York School abstract expressionist, is an important source of inspiration for Rubin; in fact, the two were paired in a show a couple of years ago at the Singer Gallery. Like Resnick’s, Rubin’s compositions have no particular point of attention, instead giving the entire surface the same pictorial value.

Almost all of the paintings by Keith, Himmelfarb and Rubin are brand-spanking-new, and as I walked around the Havu gallery, I could smell the not-yet-dry oil on the paintings. I guess that’s why the show’s called Wet Paint.

Originally published by Westword (New Times, Inc.), Mar 25, 2004:

Best Abstract Ensemble: Wet Paint, William Havu Gallery

Abstract-expressionist painting has miraculously held on despite the onslaught in the last decade of “new media,” a field that includes installation, performance, video and digital. These forms were supposed to make painting look out of date, but, as Wet Paint proves, that’s not what happened. The exhibit, which is open through April 10, showcases three artists covering new ground by riffing on classic ideas. And that’s a national trend, as the show also proves, because the three artists live in different big cities across the country: Jeffrey Keith is from Denver, John Himmelfarb comes from Chicago, and Michael Rubin hails from New York.

Talk about big, talk about colorful, and one must mention blotches of blue, green lattice, red bursting forth everywhere, with swatches of black and orange for good measure. These powerful hues and tints apply to John Himmelfarb’s two huge paintings on the first floor of the Cook County Administration Building at 69 W. Washington St.

Himmelfarb’s paintings are based on representational forms found in the urban landscape. Things such as arches, ladders and bridges are piled on top of one another until they lose their specific references. They become elements in a densely packed composition that evokes by turns paintings by the German Expressionists, calligraphic fantasies of Paul Klee and the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet. Franz Kline’s paintings are also alluded to here. As befits a former musician, Himmelfarb’s diverse body of work is unified by an acute sense of orchestration. The rhythms of the work become more important than any other element in moving the viewer to enter into the painting. The tempo of each piece is carefully dictated through juxtapositions of several weights of line whose application varies from delicate, pencil-fine loops to bold paint-dripping boundaries of a three-inch band.

Christopher Moore, writing in the Christchurch, New Zealand, Press, saw more than line at play. He said Himmelfarb’s paintings hurl themselves from the wall with a loose-limbed, exuberant, cock-eyed American happiness which demands attention. There is nothing reclusive or broodingly Calvinist about his art. There are usual references to improvisational jazz, overhead railways and stained glass. Above all, there is color. Himmelfarb is firmly established as one of the world’s foremost contemporary American abstract expressionists.

Himmelfarb’s father, who died in 1976, was also a painter, and his mother, at 93, lives alone and still paints. Hyde Park has played a part in their lives, since they all lived there at various times and John is living in Hyde Park now.

John Himmelfarb’s work appears in collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Center Pompidou in Paris, London’s British Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and many more. He also has a long list of one-person exhibitions to his credit.

Speaking of his two paintings at the Cook County Building, Himmelfarb states, “I’d like to get six more in that space, two for each of the four seasons.” Sounds like a great idea to me.

EXCERPT:

The Centre of Contemporary Art is featuring a quartet of new shows to celebrate spring. Catherine Brough, Chin Hsiang Chang, and Matthew Ayton display panache and spirit in their individual exhibitions, while upstairs two expressionists, separated by geography but united by art, join forces to produce a joint show that explodes energetically from the Mair gallery’s chaste walls. The combination of American John Himmelfarb and New Zealander Philip Trusttum is a union made in heaven, or in this case the United States Embassy, which is sponsoring the exhibition. Himmelfarb and Trusttum might approach their art from different directions but they share a commitment and discipline that has produced one of Christchurch’s best shows of 2003. See it and rejoice.

EXCERPT:

The eclectic curatorial programme of Christchurch’s Centre of Contemporary Art continues to straddle the role of the gallery as both vehicle for regional art and showcase for national and international exhibitions.

In October, two recipients of the United States Krasner-PoIlock award — Christchurch-based Philip Trusttum and Chicago-based John Himmelfarb — came together for an outstanding exhibition of paintings. The result was a triumphant clash of United States urban jazz and European classical folklore, myth and history.

Himmelfarb’s work is close up and lineal, colour and form twisting and stepping into the vertical grids and structures of high rises, railways and motorways. Bursting out of an industrial toolkit of loose springs, coils, dispensers, bolts and nuts, these angled lines and coloured blocks climb up the canvas like exuberant, celebratory urban road maps.

The larger works by Trusttum are slashed with the figures of the musician, the troubadour, the chronicler. Asian masks, towering gates, great oxen — flashes of history rolling along in complete mastery of colour, form and visual narration. In Women Gossiping, the words fall from the mouths of the characters with all the multifarious versions of meaning. In Scream they explode in a controlled riot of angled lettering. Trusttum denies these works the stillness of history — the words twist, turn, pile up, filling the air with voices. In Lumbering Oxen you can almost hear the wheels creak in revolution, the effort of the oxen pulling its huge weight into the ground. It’s a compelling, passionate show, a victory of colour and form over the great sprawling soundtrack of human myth-making.

Normally, the Savannah Art Gallery at Indiana University Northwest is spick-and-span, with polished wooden floors.

Lately, this has hardly been the case. Those passing by see paint containers spread around on a plastic tarp as an array of brushes stand ready to be used. One might expect Ann Fritz, art director, to be frazzled over such a mess, but the opposite is true.

“I am so excited; this is something we don’t see. We only see the work hanging on the wall,” said Fritz as she watched artist John Himmelfarb create a mural on a canvas covering a wall more than 60 feet long.

Himmelfarb is engrossed in his work as part of an exhibit titled “Wall to Wall.” Fritz and Himmelfarb feel it is vital for visitors to understand what an artist experiences from start to finish in the creative process. Consequently, they answered questions while Himmelfarb worked.

“Bump, bump, bump” he said, humming a few bars as he followed the bright blues and reds of his colossal creation.

With glasses that slid to the tip of his nose, Himmelfarb thought for awhile, painted a bright-gold cloud, thought some more, then moved his ladder down a couple feet and painted another cloud.

“Each color will have its own movement throughout the canvas,” said Himmelfarb, adding that the change in balance and dissent helped give the piece harmony.

Unlike artists of the impressionist period, when paintings copied detail, Himmelfarb called his work abstract expressionism, which demands interpretation from the viewer.

Rahsaan Taylor, 23, of Gary gazed at the mural. “I think it is interesting, interactive and colorful. To me, one sees the different views of Gary. Some people might look at it as a chaotic composition, but Himmelfarb’s emphasis is on meaning, rather than style.”

Fritz has noticed that those who normally visit the campus a couple times a week have stopped by more often to follow Himmelfarb’s progress. She said he doesn’t know the title or when the mural will be finished. He said he just follows his gut feeling and intuition.

“The colors are so striking and it looks like someone’s imagination was flowing,” said Ernestine Johnson of Merrillville, who passes through Gary daily. “There are the smoke stacks and the heavy-duty machines. Oh, and there is U.S. Steel and the cranes. It is the different dimensions that made Gary what it is today.”

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John Himmelfarb, a painter from Chicago, had a one-week visiting artist residency at Normal Editions Workshop in February 2002. This program was partially sponsored by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council (IAC), an agency of the State of Illinois. Mr. Himmelfarb collaborated with the N.E.W. staff during his stay to produce a color trial proof (C.T.P.) impression of a multi-colored lithograph. Xerox toner washes on grained mylar and hand drawing by the artist were utilized in creating the image. The color trial proof was hand printed by Richard Finch and Veda Rives with assistance from Chad Collofello, Yoko Kawazoe, Meda Rives and Chris Shepherd. The 22×30 inch image is printed on Arches Cover, buff paper. We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to the IAC for the support of this project: John Himmelfarb at Normal Editions Workshop, Illinois State University.

Is there a “Chicago” art? That’s a question that’s been debated and discussed, but not nearly as much as it should be, says James Yood of North Town, lecturer and assistant chair of the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. “Men and women of goodwill will argue on both sides of that question.”

“I think there is an indigenous, local style,” he says, adding that it isn’t as clearly defined as a movements like Impressionism or Surrealism were. He also says that not every artist or every work has all or even any of the characteristics of that style. “But in general, there is an interest in the figure, slightly less interest in abstraction than you find in New York, and Chicago art is often on a relatively smaller scale, done with great attention to detail and finish.”

One reason that a “Chicago style” cannot be easily defined is the nature of Chicago artists. “Chicago is a place of extraordinarily independent artists who are not part of any national or international movement. We have often rewarded those with an idiosyncratic, personal vision,” he says.

Yood dates the history of Chicago’s active art community to the 1920s, and Ivan Albright. “He lived into the 1980s, and there have been nationally and internationally known artists in Chicago ever since. For instance, there’s H.C. Westerman, who just had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed Paschke, Richard Hunt, Chicago produces some very fine artists.”

Yood would also like to see Chicagoans get over that slight vestige of Second City syndrome. “We still have a bit of a cultural inferiority complex. There’s still some idea that if art doesn’t come from Europe or New York, it’s not good art,” he says, “But our history shows otherwise.”

Chicagoans also tend to overlook the native art community because it doesn’t make headlines. “The real surprise here is that the art community is so big. It’s just that it all happens under the radar screen,” he says.

“But many artists prefer to stay in Chicago because life is more manageable here. There are galleries, museums. curators and collectors interested in your work. There are at least 100 galleries now. Maybe people are flying in from Minneapolis to buy art, but somebody is buying it,” he says.

He says there’s no reason to worry that people don’t visit galleries, either. “Most people are intimidated by them — they don’t know how to act, they don’t know the jargon, or they feel they’re expected to buy something. But it doesn’t matter. People do go to the shows at the Cultural Center, where they can see a lot of Chicago artists’ work, and the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute. Chicago is the cultural capital of the Midwest.”

In honor of Illinois Arts week, here are profiles of a few of the artists currently carrying on the tradition of Chicago art.

JOHN HIMMELFARB

John Himmelfarb sees no reason to leave Chicago, and plenty to stay. Though he grew up outside the city, he now lives and works here. He’s always gotten a lot of inspiration from the city and surroundings. “l did a painting of the Gary steel mills when I was 10,” he says.

“I have pretty deep roots here. And I’m a contrary person. When people told me, ‘you can’t make a living as an artist in Chicago,’ and ‘you have to go to New York,’ I said, “Oh yeah?'” Himmelfarb says.

Since 1993, Himmelfarb has been working on a series of paintings called “Inland Romance” that reflect his attachment to the city and the Midwest. At … see ART, Page 2

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Out of expressionism comes the vibrant and vivacious, stylized works of John Himmelfarb, which, in their inventiveness and diversity, refuse to be pigeonholed by particulars. Paying confident homage to Modernism, Himmelfarb can be referenced to a fine pedigree of artists and movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Art Brut, Paul Klee, Joan Miro and Picasso, illustrating a contextual richness and a highly ferocious visual appetite.

Unfailingly Himmelfarb’s potent works trumpet a response to the artist’s experience, Even at their most abstract they echo something visceral in the human condition — maybe a mood, perhaps a thought, possibly an occurrence — and Himmelfarb has developed his work sufficiently to know that the encapsulation of this does not require explanation. Entrée to the works can be found, though, in the little biographical details of life that act as markers of personality. A strong involvement in music matches the lyrical, rhythmical qualities of Himmelfarb’s paintings and drawings. Improvisational jazz can be heard and felt among a myriad of tones that could conceivably run from classical to hip-hop. Some are coolly composed while others an orchestrated frenzy, which in large scale provides works not only to walk past but also, perhaps, to whistle to.

The figurative concerns given form by Himmelfarb’s hand are thematically and visually eclectic, drawn from his realm of experience, both conscious and unconscious. Cartoon-like phalluses hover rocket-like while numbers and letters appear alongside Himmelfarb’s own intriguing visual icons that in their pared down simplicity symbolize, and are stylisations of, his natural and built environ. These elements weave through the works, making brief appearances here or dominating a strong linear composition there. Our innate desire to define, interpret and understand ensures these works are, by virtue of each other, both endlessly inviting and perpetually frustrating. They resist clear cut interpretations of intent and refuse to be emphatically deciphered. Suggestions are offered, possibilities allowed and narratives glimpsed. That is all. Mark making, however, is a constant, reigning supreme as a sensuously tactile reward. More than a by-product of image the surface qualities are a further exploration of line and tempo and a tantalising reminder of the creative act.

Himmelfarb was born in Chicago in 1946 and currently fives and works there. He graduated from Harvard in 1968 and has been involved in more than 110 solo and group exhibitions and has received a number of awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and two from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in more than 40 institutions internationality including the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., the British Museum, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Museum d’Art Moderne, Paris. This is the first New Zealand exhibition of Himmelfarb’s work.

Sponsored by the Embassy of the United States of America, Wellington New Zealand, and AB Annand & Co Ltd

ACCOMPANYING IMAGES:

Inland Romance: Halsted North Branch | 1994 acrylic on canvas 67.5×83.5″

Shopper | 2001 drawing 40×60″

EXCERPT:

Chicago artist John Himmelfarb’s exhibition is a celebration of the joyous possibilities of abstract expressionism.

With overt references to many of the big names of American post-war art, there is not great innovation in the work, but the monumental scale and energetic use of line in works such as Inland Romance: Nino Rota in Chicago involve the viewer in the process and pleasure of paintwork.

In Hello Again and Metropolitan Swans, Himmelfarb creates multiple layers of paint, and inventively uses calligraphy and mock hieroglyphics to create appealing works that reward close reading.

John Himmelfarb’s current exhibition of lush, calligraphic drawings and paintings at the Jean Albano Gallery, June 5-July 10, continues this established artist’s rich investigation of his Modernist roots. Himmelfarb’s accomplished works have always been driven by an unceasing devotion to line. In his second solo exhibition at the Jean Albano Gallery, Himmelfarb reasserts the poetic voice that is at the emotional core of his long commitment to this formal element.

Consistently blurring the boundaries between drawing and painting, Himmelfarb revels in line’s evocative potential to create a synthesis of graphic sign, text and elusive image that challenges one’s ability to interpret visual language. In the process, he initiates inward journeys whose rewards are not measured by reaching specific destinations, but by the experiences of the chosen path.

Uncompromising in their directness, Himmelfarb’s works are in a constant state of movement. His rough, yet elegant, images are indebted to his Modernist predecessors — the bold, interlocking shapes of Jean Dubuffet, the raw brushwork of the Cobra artists, the rhythmic Hebrew alphabet paintings of Ben Shahn — yet are distinct in their own identity. Maintaining an uneasy balance between the positive and negative spaces of his dense, lattice-like compositions, Himmelfarb pushes the formal and conceptual elasticity of his marks, allowing one to see that in life what is often worth discovering is hidden between the lines.

FEATURED IMAGES:

Inland Romance: Movie Lights | 1998 acrylic on canvas 30×45″

Poem of Prospero | 1998 acrylic on canvas 50×34″

John Himmelfarb’s new work at Jean Albano Gallery carries on his intense conversation with himself in the language he has made up. This invented text of symbols looks to be nonsensical yet meaningful, a mix of Egyptian hieroglyphics with the Hebrew alphabet.

The drawings and even the paintings are all about the suppleness of line and the nuance of expression in its meanderings. Himmelfarb has organized his made-up symbols into rows and columns, making them look like pages from ancient religious texts. Even the paintings feature these interlaced symbols, appearing to be calligraphic road signs in a foreign language in a place where English is not spoken.

Himmelfarb’s work tends to be layered. Below each layer of text appears to be another, perhaps in yet another invented language. They suggest codes beneath puzzles, inviting the viewer to become a linguistic detective and figure them out. Some even break into plain English, like modern graffiti on some ancient tablet.

Himmelfarb’s paintings and drawings, particularly, seem to be about communication, about the effort and elaboration involved in that essential human act. That they are fundamentally unreadable yet brimming with meaning seems to be part of the artist’s point.

JOHN DAVID HIMMELFARB

BORN: Chicago, IL; June 3, 1946

EDUCATION: Harvard Univ, Cambridge, MA, BA, 1968, MAT, 1968-70

AWARDS: First Prize, Western IL Univ, 1979; Yaddo Fel, 1979; Nat Endowment for the Arts Grants, 1982,85; Pollock-Krasner Found, 1986; Illinois Arts Council Award, Chicago, IL, 1986

RECENT EXHIB: Chicago Cultural Center, IL, 1995-96; Illinois State Univ, Normal Editions Workshop, IL, 1994,95,96,97; Sioux City Art Center, IA, 1994,95,96,97

COLLECTIONS: Chicago Art Inst, IL; Fogg Art Mus, Cambridge, MA; Baltimore Mus of Art, MD; Nat Coll of Fine Arts, Wash, DC; Minneapolis Inst of Art, MN; Brooklyn Mus, NY; Cleveland Art Mus, OH; Univ of Iowa Art Mus, Iowa City, IA; Illinois State Mus, Springfield, IL; Minnesota Art Mus, St Paul, MN; Elvehjem Arts Center, Univ of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; Sheldon Mem Art Gallery, Univ of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Univ of Minnesota Art Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; Portland Art Mus, OR; Albrecht Art Mus, St Joseph, MO; Univ of Oregon Art Mus, Eugene, OR; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Smithsonian Inst, Wash, DC; Indianapolis Mus of Art, IN

PRINTERS: Will Petersen, Evanston, IL (WP); Cynthia Archer, Evanston, IL (CA); Plucked Chicken Press, Evanston, IL (PCP); Timothy Berry, San Francisco, CA (TB); Teaberry Press, San Francisco, CA (TP)(OB); John Nichols, Printmakers & Publishers, NY (JN)(OB); Veda Rives, Normal, IL (VR); Larry Bemm, Normal, IL (LB); Richard Finch, Normal, UIL (RF); Normal Editions Workshop, Illinois State Univ, Normal, IL (NEW); J Nebraska Gifford, NY (JNG); Warren Nisley, Chicago, IL (WN); Four Brothers Press, Chicago, IL (FBPr); Arz Nova (AN); David Jones Chicago, IL (DJ); Anchor Graphics, Chicago, IL (AnkGr); Proto Grafix, Ltd (PGL); Eric Robbins (ER); Full Court Press (FCPr); Arthur Blake Pearce (ABP); Griffin Etching Press (GEPr)(OB); Edward H Shay, Carbondale, IL (EHS); Allyn Print Shop, Southern Illinois Univ, Carbondale, IL (APS/SIU); Jack Lemon, Chicago, IL (JL); Jerry Raidiger, Chicago, IL (JR); David Keister, Chicago, IL (DK); Ronald Wyffels, Chicago, IL (RW); Stone Roller, Chicago, IL (SR); Landfall Press, Chicago, IL (LPI); Norman Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, Ml (NS); Joe Keenan, Bloomfield Hills, Ml (JK); Corey Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, MI (CS); Susan Stewart, Bloomfield, Ml (SS); Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, Ml (S-S); Andrew Rubin, Madison, WI (AR); Tandem Press, Univ of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (TanPr); Rudy Pozzatti, Bloomington, IN (RP); David Calkins, Bloomington, IN (DC); Echo Press, Bloomington, IN (EPr)(OB); Artist (ART)

PUBLISHERS: Balkin Editions, Chicago, IL (BE)(OB); John Nichols, Printmakers & Publishers, NY (JN)(OB); Landfall Press, Inc, Chicago, IL (LPI); Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, Ml (S-S); Tandem Press, Univ of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (TanPr); Arz Nova (AN); Chicago Board of Options Exchange, IL (CBOE); Allyn Print Shop, Southern Illinois Univ, Carbondale, IL (APS/SIU); Normal Editions Workshop, Illinois State Univ, Normal, IL (NEW); Four Brothers Press, Chicago, IL (FBPr); Full Court Press (FCPr); Echo Press, Bloomington, IN (EPr)(OB); Artist (ART)

GALLERIES: Landfall Press, Chicago, IL; Gallery 72, Omaha, NE; Spaightwood Galleries, Madison, WI; Peltz Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago, IL; Normal Editions, Illinois State University, Normal, IL; Quartet Editions, New York, NY

MAILING ADDRESS: 2400 S Oakley, #2-R, Chicago, IL 60608

Stewart & Stewart, printer and publisher of fine art prints since 1980, announces a pair of new screenprints by John Himmelfarb. The American painter recently revisited Stewart & Stewart to collaborate on Gizmo and Whiz-Bang. Exhibited globally, Himmelfarb works in his Chicago loft and resides in nearby Oak Park, Illinois.

Both abstracts are full of twisting and turning passages. The fresh images achieve greater depth than those previously completed in Himmelfarb’s recent series of interlocking paths. Now layers of playful road-like lines overlap, rather than interlock, floating shapes. Gizmo is hand printed in blue, green, beige and black. Whiz-Bang is yellow-orange, red, blue, and black. The Rives BFK 100% rag paper measures 41″ high x 28.5″ wide, and both vertical images are 36″ high x 20″ wide. Both four-color screenprints are limited editions of 38.  …  The Stewart & Stewart website features the new Himmelfarb editions plus additional information on the artist.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Himmelfarb grew up in a household of artists surrounded by their art and the countryside that inspired them. An alumnus of Harvard University, he returned to Chicago in 1970. Over forty institutions have Himmelfarb’s work in their collections. Numerous solo exhibitions have featured his unique imagery in private galleries internationally.

Stewart & Stewart is a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA). Transparent colors, rarely seen in screenprints, and painterly printmaking techniques characterize its prints. Curators and collectors appreciate the full documentation that accompanies each print. Masterprinter, Norman Stewart and his partner and spouse, Susan Stewart, have collaborated with artists since 1980. The new Himmelfarb screenprints were created in the historical country setting of what originally was the gardeners quarters of the Book Family summer estate, built in 1923 and once owned by Edsel Ford. Stewart & Stewart also features select consigned prints.

Crafty Folk: Original, hand-painted platters by artist John Himmelfarb are among the creations by local artists available at the new Shop at the Cultural Center. Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, to 5 p.m. Sunday. Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. Call: 312-744-6630.

EXCERPT:

A little bit of this and a little bit of that can be found at a group show at the Jean Albano Gallery.

Chicagoan John Himmelfarb’s mixed media on paper, “Cake and Coffee,” is a visual treat. Against a soft yellow background, the artist has combined difficult-to-read pencil markings. Atop these are larger forms outlined in pink. All meld beautifully.

EXCERPT:

Three outstanding exhibitions are on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, each representing a different aspect of visual arts. John Himmelfarb displays painting, John Buck shows sculptures, and Jeanne-Marie Head presents photographs. All three bring a fresh inventiveness and compelling presence in their art.

Inland Romance: Paintings by John Himmelfarb shows large-scale colorful abstract paintings along with selected works on paper, all subtly referring, in varying degrees, to the urban landscape.

In the Inland Romance series, Himmelfarb renders his vision of the city in labyrinthine complexity with a flattened special plane that emphasizes pattern. Himmelfarb’s modernist heroes are Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet.

The paintings appear as delicately balanced puzzles or roadmaps, with a strong rhythmic current reflecting the artist’s passion for music. The paint is often thickly applied and imparts an architectural quality, with vivid colors overlapping like buildings on a hill. One work evokes the greenery of a landscape while another could be a dizzying roller-coaster tracks.

In addition, the artist includes prints and drawing created with an imaginary hieroglyphic language.

Himmelfarb is a Chicago-area artist, who inherited a rich visual vocabulary from his parents, established artists Elean-

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works from the mid-1980’s to the present.

High Marks: A new exhibit at Gallery 1756 highlights the calligraphic works of Chicago artist John D. Himmelfarb. Gallery hours: Noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. 1756 N. Sedgwick St.

PHOTO CAPTION:

John Himmelfarb is not exhibiting his acrylic-on-flesh work, but his pieces on canvas are currently at “Catalyst ’95: 16 Contemporary Oak Park and River Forest Artists,” at the Oak Park Art League, 720 Chicago Ave., Oak Park, through Feb. 25.

Stewart & Stewart, printer and publisher of fine art prints, announces five new releases by Chicago artist, John Himmelfarb. The five screenprints are Note of Appeal in eight colors; Short Order, in six colors; Fax Appeal, in three colors; First Draft, in two colors; and White Out, in one color. The prints are approximately 30×22″ in limited editions of seventeen impressions or less. This work continues Himmelfarb’s playful exploration of letterforms and their changing meaning in our culture.

When asked about his inspiration for these screenprints Himmelfarb recalls, “I got the idea for this series from some reading I’d done about two years ago. I read a book by O.B. Hardison, Jr., a series of essays called Disappearing Through The Skylight. He analyzed various parts of American society using the metaphor of disappearing. Hardison talked about deconstructionism in literature in which certain parties advocated removing or weakening the meaning of specific words so they could be used in a more playful or plastic manner. That seems humorous to me, taken to its extreme. Does removing the meaning of words end the possibility for communication? But if you can take the meaning out of the words, why not take the words out of the text and be left with just the shell form of the text?

Like Picasso and Calder, Himmelfarb is the son of artists. Born in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois to Eleanor and the late Samuel, Himmelfarb grew up surrounded by art. Once a violinist and pianist, Himmelfarb often listens to music when he is painting. After graduating from Harvard University, Himmelfarb did calligraphic drawings in the 1970’s that were free form streams of consciousness. His paintings are “based on a curious amalgam of postwar expressionism and surrealism,” cites Helen Sheridan, Director, Collections & Exhibitions of Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Well-read and articulate, Himmelfarb is now concerned with Western documents and how, in our particular culture, words are disappearing, losing their meaning and disappearing from text.

The November 1993 visit to the studio of Stewart & Stewart was Himmelfarb’s third collaboration with the Masterprinter, Norman Stewart and his partner and wife, Susan Stewart. These screenprint editions were created in the country setting of what was once, in the 1920’s, the gardeners’ quarters of the Book Family summer estate once owned by Edsel Ford in Bloomfield Township. Since 1980, transparent colors and painterly techniques, rare in screenprinting circles, characterize the print collaboration between Stewart & Stewart and American artists.

John Himmelfarb, Fax Appeal, First Draft, Note of Appeal, Short Order, White Out (1993), five color screenprints signed and numbered by the artist in editions of three to 17. Each print is 26×18 in. (image size) and 29-3/4×21-3/4 in. (paper size) and was printed on Rives BFK paper by Norman Stewart assisted by the artist at Wing Lake Studio in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Each presents calligraphic drawing in the form of a document or letter. Note of Appeal looks like a standard request for a charity donation, replete with list of board members and official stamp. First Draft looks like more personal writing on a legal pad, and so on. Complicating the picture, Himmelfarb has layered more than one drawing in all of these prints except White Out, which, printed white on white, is as elusive as the others. The calligraphy is at first convincing as rows of verbal information, but it proves to be deliberate expressionistic gibberish dense with an emotional reality. “The actual words we read are often masked or merely a facade for an underlying meaning that we can’t see. That’s where in order to read critically and to derive a richer meaning from what we’re looking at, we have to look at underlying meanings, hidden meanings,” he explains, in an interview with Susan Stewart. “l think these letters are part of a dialogue about what is the difference between visual information and visual art; and visual information about visual art and visual art about visual information!” In other words, look further. Price: $750 each. Published by Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills.

Stereotypical impressions of Japanese art mislead us — as stereotypes are wont to do — into assuming that the art of that tradition is only mystical, feudal, esoteric and no fun.

Wrong!

Even the rarified and aristocratic Noh drama has its farces — kyogen — and the refined court poetic form, waka, its daffy side, kyoka, or “mad verse,” somewhat in the spirit of the film “Tampopo.”

Roger Shimamura, professor of art at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, taps into this rich vein of humor in an exhibition of acrylic-on-canvas works, “Return of the Yellow Peril” as outrageously bold in utilizing (and transcending) racial stereotypes as the Fox Network comedy tour de force “In Living Color.”

On display at the UNI Gallery of Art and cleverly installed by Gallery Director Julie Nelson, this “kyo-e” of Shimamura spins off of ukiyo-e, pop art, genre painting and go-see-for-yourself in a bittersweetly endearing series of tributes to Shimamura’s friends in Lawrence. The works form a visual diatribe against racism.

“Roy Lichtenstein’s and Franz Hals’ Bogus Journey to Edo” might be a reasonable sub-title for the exhibition. Happily, Shimamura, himself — also a performance artist — will be on hand to present his multi-media theater piece, “Campfire Diary,” at 8 p.m. Sept. 21, in the Bertha Martin Theatre, free and open to the public.

Every bit as whimsical, but with very different visual purport, are John Himmelfarb’s works in pen and ink, lithography and etching which consist of the artist’s personal glyphic and graphic orthography — or, definitively speaking, “idiopseudocacography.”

Himmelfarb gives us specimens of post cards, not-for-profit letterheads, rosetta stones, etc., that — in terms of most linguistic limits — remain unlettered, indecipherable. A closer look, however, yields up a communications world of subtly suggestive messages of high visual elegance.

Finally, Neva Krohn, who attended Iowa State Teachers College from 1929-31, has presented artworks to the university represented in an exhibit that includes works by Picasso, Braque, Chagall and Albers, to name four biggies. This generous gift is a welcome and significant addition to the artistic life of the metro area.

Art lovers who stay away do so at their own peril, whether yellow or either of the other two primary colors.

Stewart & Stewart, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., has hand-printed and published “Juggler on Stage,” shown, by John Himmelfarb in an edition of 24. The 5-color screenprint on Rives BFK 100 percent rag paper has a 36-3/4- by 25-inch image and an opening price of $1,250. Other new works by the artist include “Juggler,” “Stolen Glance,” and “Yellow Rose.” The company also offers Janet Fish’s latest release, “Waimea,” a 13-color screenprint. The image, measuring 36 by 24 inches, is hand-printed on Rives BFK 100 percent rag paper. It has an $1,800 opening price.

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John Himmelfarb has a resume as long as both your arms. For decades this highly seasoned and accomplished artist has been hard at work investigating, interpreting, inventing, and reinventing paintings, prints, and sculptures that express his feelings and views of the world around him. Chicago based and collected by a voluminous bunch of notable museums and institutions, his art is both visually playful and rife with content.

His work reflects a host of influences. Traditional Modernist abstraction, ancient hieroglyphics, comic book cartoon, and cartography to name just a few. I also see a bit of Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston as well. With a keen interest in pattern and symbol his presentations are playful and decorative without sacrificing a sense of purpose that keeps you returning to the work. His paintings speak of the cacophony of the modern world and the frenetic pace of life in ways that wink and do not overwhelm. There is an underlying sense of humor that (like the spoon full of sugar) helps the medicine go down. They are visually seductive and once they’ve got you hooked they slip a message under the back door of your mind so that you walk away just a little bit different, but you’re not quite sure what just happened. There are a number of recurring themes that act as strains of thought. These are clearly ongoing narratives in his life and work. They provide through lines that document his evolving and shifting point of view.

I’m all for the excitement and energy of emerging artists but it’s also nice to occasionally bask in the glow of a consummate professional. This is John Himmelfarb. The rough edges and occasional miscues are gone. What is left is the sureness, confidence, and professionalism of an artist at the top of his game. Clearly still passionate about his mission.

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Floating images spiral with force. Energy, drama and inner conflict fill huge, panoramic canvases. Forms undulate, monsters grow, and cool greens meet with fiery reds. Chicago native John Himmelfarb challenges us to peer into the stream-of-consciousness landscape of his dreams, a landscape deeply influenced by his childhood in the wooded area of Winfield, Illinois. After a close look, his barely recognizable forms become intertwining trees, running dogs and wild birds flying among overgrown foliage and thickets.

Himmelfarb’s work has been described as a cross between post-war expressionism and surrealism. His paintings are influenced by both the abstractionism of Jackson Pollock and the art brut expressionism of Jean Dubuffet’s childlike imagery.

His new work is inspired by a recent visit to Gallifa, Spain, where he attended the J. Llorens Artigas Foundation on a grant from Chicago Artists Abroad. Himmelfarb, who continues to paint in his Pilsen studio, is represented by Roger Ramsay Gallery in Chicago and galleries in New York, Washington D.C. and Omaha, Nebraska.

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The enormous human heads, snarling dogs and dense foliage that populate John Himmelfarb’s psychologically charged artwork appear to be symbols of some inner or outer conflict. But the Chicago-based artist is reluctant to interfere with viewers’ perceptions of his brush-and-ink drawings and vividly colored paintings.

Himmelfarb (whose paintings, drawings and prints can be seen in the retrospective “Meetings in the Garden” at the Madison Art Center through Sept. 9) is wary of offering much more than hints about how to read his most potent pieces — a reluctance that stems, in part, from his manner of working. Even at the beginning of his career, as a young Harvard graduate inspired by Jackson Pollock’s energetic mark-making and “energy fields,” Himmelfarb took an intuitive approach to the execution of the closely packed, electric doodlings that vibrate on the surface of his 1971 lithograph “Ether Ore” and the carefully organized cartoons of his 1977 etching “Early Riser.”

When, in the early ’80s, Himmelfarb began incorporating animal and human imagery into his work, he was still attempting to maintain a sense of organic energy. But the dangers associated with working on a very large scale led him to seek a template in his earlier drawings, which in turn led to the imagery that would preoccupy him for nearly five years.

“I was doing some small brush-and-ink drawings in ’82 and I wanted to enlarge those,” explains Himmelfarb. “But the small drawings had been done very spontaneously in a stream-of-conscious method of working. When I started to go up quite a bit in scale, I got stage fright, I guess, just because of the cost of the materials and the amount of time necessary. On the small scale I could do 50 pieces and select five that really worked and throw out the rest. But when I was dealing with large, expensive materials and all the time it takes to do a large-scale piece, I didn’t seem to be able to just wade right in there in the same way. And so I looked back through some small ones I could use as a model — not as an exact model but as a starting point — so I wouldn’t be starting with a complete blank in my head.”

One of the two models Himmelfarb selected, “Meeting,” is included in the retrospective. “The original image just happened in a stream-of-conscious drawing,” he says. “I don’t think I was thinking about anything. I was just making a drawing out of an intuitive mark-making process, so there’s no way to tap into what was the psychological base for that. … All the artist can do is read back into it after it’s already there, and try to analyze it visually and psychologically and analyze it in literary terms or whatever.”

The one recurring image in the “Meetings” series that Himmelfarb has no difficulty explaining is the tangled garden that presses to the margin of each piece. Throughout his career, Himmelfarb has been fascinated with foliage as a subject. He grew up out in the country in an environment of dense woods, where “the horizon was not visible and the sky is always occluded by branches and leaves”; later, as a young artist he lived in an inner-city neighborhood where architectural detail, human events and industrial bric-a-brac formed a fecund, palpitating landscape.

Impressed by these natural energy fields, Himmelfarb began using gardens and dense woods as actors in his more narrative works. “I think it’s easy enough to become very self-centered and involved in what’s happening to human beings as a group or to each of us as individuals,” he explains. “But when you compare us to the total environment, then we become fairly insignificant. … I think that the garden may serve a role in determining scale or reminding us that we’re small potatoes.”

These days Himmelfarb, who is largely self-taught and belongs to no particular artistic movement, has moved away from the recognizable objects and characters that loom forbiddingly in his mid-’80s work. As he’s done periodically during his 20-year career, Himmelfarb is now abandoning representation for nonobjective imagery. The biomorphic shapes that seem to drift purposefully through the blue background of “Non-Objective No. 1,” a large painting from 1989, have all the energy of his lush foliage, but they belong to a world that apparently only exists on the canvas. As Himmelfarb puts it: “It looks like there’s something living in these things, but you can’t really say what.”

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The work of Chicago artist John Himmelfarb is a frequent sight on the walls of Midlands collectors.

“I think I’ve probably shown more here than any other single place,” he said.

After holding shows for a few years in a friend’s home, the 43-year-old artist began to regularly exhibit his work at Gallery 72 after it opened in 1972.

He sold so many pieces from one set of his work that he now refers to it as his Omaha Series.

No Exception

“I often show work here before it’s seen anyplace else — before it’s exhibited in New York or Chicago or Washington. It’s a preview town,” he said.

His current show at Gallery 72, 2709 Leavenworth St., is no exception. Among the 18 works on display are two lithographs that he just completed.

Himmelfarb is represented by Terry Dintenfass in New York; Brody’s Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and the Roger Ramsay Gallery in Chicago.

A nationally touring exhibition of his work, titled “Meetings in the Garden,” was organized by the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Institute of Arts and will open April 5 at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock.

“John’s work is based on a curious amalgam of postwar expressionism and surrealism,” wrote Helen Sheridan, Kalamazoo’s director of collections and exhibitions.

“He is strongly influenced, for example, by both the abstraction of Jackson Pollock, with its emphasis on overall gesture and markmaking, and the art brut expressionism of Jean Dubuffet, with its use of childlike imagery to suggest directness and spontaneity.”

In much of his work of the 1980s, Himmelfarb hid his figures in a dense floral or junglelike abstract background.

“When there’s imagery, it is often masked like that,” he said. “I like it when the work reads as something non-objective or design oriented for the first reading and then later the imagery sneaks up on you.”

In his most recent work, his images have become completely abstract and much more open. The largest work in the show, a free-hanging canvas about 4-1/2 feet tall and 12 feet wide, provides an example of Himmelfarb’s new direction.

It consists of gestural patterns of black strokes of acrylic painted on the floor in the style of Pollock. Certain parts of the canvas were then filled in with the primary colors of red, blue and yellow.

“Relatively speaking,” he said, “compared to a lot of my work, that work gets executed more quickly because it’s quite simple in construction. You see everything right there as opposed to a painting, which is built up over many layers.”

While it is quick to execute, he said, “It took 20 years to get there.”

Gallifa, Spain

During the early stages of any new development in his art, Himmelfarb said, he tends to use primary colors and move into more complex ones later.

This new work was inspired by Himmelfarb’s recent visit to Gallifa, Spain, a town near Barcelona where Joan Miró created his ceramics. Miró traveled there over several decades to collaborate with world-renowned ceramicist Josep Llorens Artigas.

Artigas’ son established a foundation in the town, which offers residencies to artists from around the world. Himmelfarb was among the first to take advantage of the program.

During his stay, he was immersed in the world of Miró. He visited the Miró Foundation and saw works by the artist he had never seen before.

No matter what an art work might depict, Himmelfarb said,  it always serves in some way as a self-portrait of the artist.

“I imagine that’s why we are interested in art, music and literature in the first place, because it’s a way of knowing another person in a different way than we know people through conversation,” he said.

Himmelfarb’s exhibition will continue at Gallery 72 through April 7.

John Himmelfarb’s “Meetings in the Garden” displays the artist’s love of the calligraphic line and his preference for working on the responsive surface of paper. His ink drawings and prints are more successful than his half dozen acrylics on canvas and one timid oil on canvas. There are 31 works in all, several from as early as 1971, to show a stylistic cohesiveness that has characterized Himmelfarb’s career, (as well as a full representation of the of the 1980s).

There is a clear impression that we are given but a glimpse of tremendous investigative energy in this show of etchings, woodcuts, small ink drawings, paintings on canvas, and tour de force ink paintings on paper which are up to 32 feet long. The works present several interesting contradictions. Himmelfarb’s work is steeped in the memory of childhood fears, and in fact much has been made of his upbringing in the wooded area of Winfield, Illinois. It is easy to detect the crude figures of man or boy and dog, wild birds, thickets, and foliage in the images he creates sometimes in cartoon style and at other times in an art brut abstraction. What Himmelfarb does to give force to what could be too simple imagery is to increase the work to literally monsterous proportions.

Another contradiction is the play between work developed in a cartoon style, particularly the “Boat Man” series, and work handled in a brutish abstraction such as the large-scale “Meetings” series. The work rendered in a cartoon style can be seen as relaxed and intimate, but it is also perilously close to easily digestible imagery.

The major works, the “Meetings” series, show Himmelfarb in full command of his vision and methods. The works are dizzyingly abstract, the forms undulate, light flickers over barely recognizable forms. Enormous expanses of soft gray washes suggest terrain. The soft paper is whipped with confident black lines. No pencil tracings chart the course. Monsters grow in the perils of his methods, yet they are protected by growling canines. Together, man and beast, face the intruder, usually only partly seen and usually on the right side of the piece. Even the powerful woodcut, Lumber Street Meeting, was drawn with the hero or protagonist on the left and intruder or antagonist on the right. It is merely the nature of printmaking that has caused the reversal of Himmelfarb’s formula. This woodcut is 30×62 inches, but contains the same vigor as the large ink paintings which range from 90×144 inches to 90×381 inches.

Some smaller works merit attention. Bone is a raw and direct lithographic image of man and dog. Neither creature is dominant; they are drawn together by a primal interrelationship of which the bone is a symbol. The rough figures are drawn against a stark black ground. Lava Flow, 1986, and Summerlight Meeting, 1988, are two distinctly different prints developed from the same plate. There is a powerful abstraction achieved by the careful balance of figure and ground. Lava Flow shows two highly abstract heads facing each other in black and cadmium red. The color combination is aggressive. In Summerlight Meeting an entirely different image is created by using aqua blue instead of black and clear chrome yellow instead of red. Here the figures facing each other look sunstruck and in love. The results are hypnotic. These small etchings are beautifully abstract and show that Himmelfarb can create powerful imagery in any scale.

Cynthia M. Kukla is a painter and associate professor of art at Northern Kentucky University

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Despite a thorough grounding in pre-modern art, an intellectual foundation which many find too cozy to build upon, Gallery director Alain Joyaux in the past several years has revealed an increasing sympathy for art of the last 40 years. He does what he can with the budget he has — impressive enough with not very much.

He has acquired some respectable paintings by the likes of second-rank, first-generation abstract expressionists Norman Bluhm, Michael Goldberg and Alfred Leslie in his pre-figurative days, not to mention a striking large-scale diptych by Italian neo-expressionist Mimmo Paladino. This growing modernist collection alone is worth the drive.

At the same time, he has put together a series of small caliber yet accurate shows aimed at the oft-overlooked quadrant of the art firmament between the modern saints and its most recent stars — an area lacking the luster of big-name exhibitions but containing the majority of artists.

Most careers, either artist’s or curator’s, are built brick-by-brick with small, creditable shows like this — another line on the resume. The process tends to select for safety, but safety with an edge, a familiar razor.

New Yorker Richard Hennessy and Chicagoan John Himmelfarb are not the sort of artists who boldly go where no one has gone before. Both are technically competent, relatively sedate in their formal ambitions, ultimately more interested in intellectual challenge than aesthetic shock. It’s a good show, and in a funny way, sort of a sad show.

Hennessy is the less-polished of the two. On first look, his technique appears raw, perhaps unfinished, and almost offensively casual. (Can he get away with so little work?) Broad areas and simple shapes are washed over in broad, simple brushwork, perhaps even sponge work. His color does not really describe forms: it filters and obscures them like layers of colored Cellophane over funky, abstract structures with no particular resemblance to anything other than new-wave furniture in some vague, science-fictionish landscaping.

The works do not invite close scrutiny. Much like theater flats, they look as good as they’re going to from 10 feet away. The artist apparently recognizes the obviousness, the artificiality, the theatricality of their illusions in their titles: Blue Theater, El Teatro de la Grandeza (The Theater of Grandeur).

If there is an inhabiting spirit it is cynicism. Like Guardi In 18th-century Venice, Hennessy sees the world as a dance of appearances. Like Guardi, Hennessy’s paint, too liquid to pass as flesh, merely coats or veils his substanceless subjects. The eye gropes to focus and grasps nothing.

Grandiloquent doodles, they are tinged with maniacal innocence, insistent yet ultimately aware that it’s all much ado about not much. There is some pathos in this.

Some note of short-circuited innocence also informs Himmelfarb’s art. In six large-scale, brush and ink drawings, his consistent cast of characters is a large, gnomish face, often In combination with a snarling, feral creature and another grotesque face, all seen interwoven with forest foliage.

The faces are filled with calligraphic brush strokes. He touches over every square inch of surface, creating a whole cartography in a face. Like the whole world, the images are almost impossible to see, spilling out to the edges, escaping vision.

The calligraphy might only be understood as a jungle of lines, vines and leaves, an explosion of hair and wrinkles. These are elusive creatures that hint of some fairytale source, perhaps the long-buried, medieval theme the leaf-clad “wildman” who became over the centuries the “boogeyman” of childhood fears.

Similarly, the obsessive mark-making harkens back to medieval manuscripts elaborated in every crevice in a style dubbed horror-vactui the fear of the void.

But, Himmelfarb’s characters are not scary. They’re really kind of goofy. The artist seems not the least bit afraid of losing himself in the meandering under- and overgrowth. The path goes nowhere but into its own unknowable depths. Himmelfarb attempts at least a heroic scale in works like Meeting in the Attic, 32 feet long, but succeeds only in multiplying the complexity.

In that, Himmelfarb and Hennessy both suspect that frustration may be unavoidable, the frustration of needing to say something but suspecting the impossibility of pronouncing it right. They embrace introversion as some remedy, coloring or weaving it to suit their formal purposes, but there remains some wistful pathos in outward aspirations spiraling inward.

Mannheimer is an associate professor of painting at the Herron School of Art, Indiana University – University at Indianapolis.

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Andersen and Grimm stories terrified me as a child, especially the illustrations of child-eating giants and snarling wolves. Apparently Himmelfarb had the same problem and decided to work it out of his system as an adult. He does the old illustrators one better by drawing the giants life-size (about 9×9 feet for a head), making his forests even scarier, and lining up the wolves’ teeth like gleaming stars on a cold winter night.

The exhibition includes ten works, mostly brush and black ink drawings, the largest being 9×32 feet in length. It consists of two giants’ portraits, with a snarling dog between them, against a background of an ominous forest — his most frequent theme. The subject is both humorous and scary, in the same way that a child smiles to ward off fear. His form is an all-over rhythmic pattern of brushstrokes suggesting a calligraphic version of an Abstract Expressionist gone haywire.

Stylistically the repeated brushstrokes recall Himmelfarb’s 1970s work with calligraphic characters, and they camouflage the image. They function well as form alone, full of energy, with an oriental respect for the elegant continuity of beautiful marks. Still, clarity of concept is firmly established, setting up an intriguing play between form and image. The drawings can be seen as serenely decorative or as dramatic visions with expressionist intensity. This duality is further extended by having the image look childishly naive (the giants have full lips and bulging eyes) while the formal resolution has the earmarks of a very sophisticated and well-educated draftsman.

Himmelfarb’s art is original. Although he is cognizant of what’s going on in the art world and in many ways has been responsive to it (his evolution from Cy Twombly-like calligraphy to trendier Neo-expressionism cannot be purely coincidental), he seems to follow his interests outside the context of -isms. His unabashed immersion in graphic art, emphasizing drawing above painting, has earned him an important place among artists who make drawings into major aesthetic statements. Himmelfarb’s current choice of subject matter is entertaining and timely; just don’t take any children under 12 to see his work.

Price range: $650 to $15,000.

Something of the child is retained within the psyche of John Himmelfarb. It manifests itself in several ways — some charming, some anxiety-laden — in the small collection of works on exhibit in his one-man show through June 14 at the Blanden Memorial Art Museum here.

The most obvious manifestation is perspective. Himmelfarb, who lives in Chicago, where he was born in 1946, often works on a vast scale, so vast, in fact, that in many cases the viewer is reduced to a childlike perspective relative to the painted images. (The largest work in this exhibition, “Meeting ‘in the Attic,” is 90 by 381 inches).

The images themselves are a thicket of fast, free-flowing, ink-wash brush strokes, applied as if by a child unafraid to explore every inch of surface and then some. That “and then some” refers to Himmelfarb’s all-over painting technique, which gives the impression that even the largest piece of paper or canvas isn’t quite large enough. Figures are crammed into spaces, often appearing “cropped” at painting’s edge.

Like his all-over technique, Himmelfarb’s subject matter is created through the sophisticated manipulation of line. Covered as the canvases are with brush strokes, the viewer must sort out the images, separating flora from fauna, and flora and fauna from stray marks.

There is a tension, springing from uncertainty, that permeates these works, leaving the viewer to further sort out whether these forceful characters — human, animal and anthropomorphic — are friend or foe, and in either case whether their personas are deliberate or a matter of viewer interpretation.

It’s as if you — placed in the role of a child — must confront a larger-than-life situation that consists of uncertain characters and then determine whether you are at risk. It’s an interesting role for the viewer that works time and again for Himmelfarb.

Himmelfarb achieves a similar quality in his smaller works as well. Painted like the large canvases, the smaller pieces present the same kind of challenges to the viewer but in a way that suggests that we viewers are stealing a small view of a larger scene. It’s as if the canvas were a window to the crowded world beyond.

Also included in the exhibition are 12 stoneware sculptures that add to the impression of childhood charm in Himmelfarb’s work. The sculptures, all of them of peculiar-looking animals, look like a cross between Pre-Columbian and kindergarten figures: elongated dogs with a variety of peculiar appendages.

While I’m completely convinced of the quality of the paintings, the clay figures are a little less convincing. It’s not that they aren’t appealing in their way, it’s just that they don’t seem to lead to anything much beyond their immediate presence. Are we supposed to read something more into them? Is there some broader purpose behind the technique? Whatever the answers, you won’t find them within the works.

I’m even more puzzled by a small grouping of what appear to be illustrations, though no text or context is offered. As drawings by themselves, they leave me cold. Each of the three relatively simple illustrations takes some aspect of dogs as its focus, but none of the works leads anywhere. They look like cartoons with the captions left off.

There are several very successful prints in the show. The lithographically produced images have much the same feel as the show’s few watercolor paintings. The heavily outlined images and lightly washed bodies of color are pulled together to create an image that is greater the sum of its parts, though not in the same league as the large works, which alone make the exhibition worth attending.

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In his fourth and fifth solo shows in New York, Chicagoan John Himmelfarb presented large brush-and-ink drawings on paper. At first glance the drawings might seem abstract, by which I mean unreadable as representational scenes; this is due in part to Himmelfarb’s brushwork that moves quickly all over the picture space. February Meeting, 1985 (40 by 60 inches), shown at Dintenfass, is typical of Himmelfarb’s recent work in that it uses heavy strokes of ink (sometimes diluted to produce watercolor effects) to depict gnarled and disfigured faces and a fierce, snarling dog. But the drawing was not made solely for the purpose of portrayal: it is also an occasion for filling up the paper with highly gestural marks so that there’s practically no white showing through. February Meeting doesn’t come close to having a pattern or a purely formal design — even in its foliate ground — yet the ink strokes that enliven its larger-than-life-size subjects suggest a formal symmetry even in their engagingly human messiness.

Himmelfarb’s largest recent work, Giant’s Meeting, 1985 (90 by 144 inches), was included in the recent “Monumental Drawings” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. As in February Meeting, an enormous face, consisting mostly of lips, nose and eyes, encounters a fiercely grinning profile which looks like it’s about to bite a dog (although Himmelfarb doesn’t actually own one, dogs frequently appear in his drawings). The puffy cheeks of the giant on the left are awash in brushstrokes. The giant is strangely impassive, but his eyes are clear, like those of a businessman making a deal. As in other drawings, the lips of the giant are very elaborately rendered; twisting vegetation forms the ground; and the teeth of the dog are bared for action.

Another quite large work, a monotype called Underwater Meeting, 1986 (90 by 138 inches), shown at Nichols, has a rather “pretty” turn to it: floating vines and seaweed (or whatever the sinuous ink lines represent) make the gigantic faces look calmer, though not nicer; or perhaps the pressure of the water makes their features more serene. In any case, Himmelfarb’s images tell the human story of how we are with each other in the world.

I first saw Himmelfarb’s large drawings at the Municipal Art Gallery in Davenport, Iowa, in January ’86, part of a selection of his black-on-white works from the past ten years. Himmelfarb’s drawings have become more realistic over time, even as they turn to more elaborate and larger formats. While he is not the only artist observing a truce in the war between representation and non-representation, Himmelfarb is one of the best.

Siouxland residents will have the opportunity to watch an artist at work when John Himmelfarb sets up a temporary studio Monday and Tuesday at Toy National Bank, Fourth and Nebraska streets.

Using brush and ink, the Chicago artist will create a large drawing,possibly as large as 4 by 8 feet, on the first floor of the bank. Spectators will see coffee cans containing ink, brushes of varying sizes and a stocking-footed artist making marks on an expansive piece of paper. When he’s not crawling around on the floor, Himmelfarb will be sitting in a chair contemplating his incipient images.

“It won’t be like Jackson Pollock — constant action. But if people want to come down and see what’s going on, then maybe come back in an hour or two, they’ll see something happening,” says Himmelfarb who had an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum last September and who has a work in the permanent collection at The Sioux City Art Center.

The artist will discuss his drawing with visitors during work breaks. But he asks that people not disturb him when work is in progress. “This is a risky kind of art process. When you put ink down, there’s no taking it back. It’s do or die. So I can’t talk when I’m actually working.”

Working in public is new for the Winfield, Ill., native. During the past week , he ventured into that territory when he created a drawing in Omaha with spectators looking on. He will use the same basic images in Sioux City that inspired him in Omaha: one large face staring out at the audience on one side of the paper and a face in profile on the other. (Although he works in a variety of media, including watercolors and sometimes ceramics, he has chosen pen and ink for these occasions.)

Discussing his images, he refers to one as a beast and the other as a human form many people see as Everyman. The artist makes it clear he will not attempt to achieve the tranquility of a landscape. Vigorous activity colors this work and conflict dominates its theme.

“I hope people will be challenged by the images, but also come away with the beauty of the design and theme,” says Himmelfarb who will have a show in May at the Blanden Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa.

Spectators must work to see that conflict and beauty. At first, they may see only a dense field of marks and believe the work is completely abstract. “I’ve watched people look at the drawings. They see pieces, then all of a sudden they see the images,” says the father of two.

The brush and ink drawings Himmelfarb is doing today are closely related to his early style when he was a student at Harvard University. “I’d start on one side and begin to fill up the page with tiny marks. It was fairly abstract, although sometimes it developed into images that looked like landscapes.”

Himmelfarb had virtually no formal art training as a child. His mother, Eleanor, and father, Samuel, both artists, purposefully avoided the academic foundation that his father had. (His late father also owned an industrial design business.) “In fact, he leaned over backwards not to teach me. He said people had to unlearn a lot of their academic background in order to come up with something original.”

But Himmelfarb was not shielded from the books, paintings and conversations about creativity that took place in his home. He and his two sisters were taken along when their parents vacationed and art museums were high on the list of attractions. On Sundays, his father let young Himmelfarb watch him in his studio and allowed him to paint. Although the elder Himmelfarb’s work became increasingly abstract, it always was concerned with groups of people, such as spectators in the stands at a baseball game.

During high school, Himmelfarb’s interest in painting and drawing faded while he seriously pursued instrumental music. At Harvard, he sought a liberal arts education. He declared a major in pre-architecture which was designed to prepare students for a graduate level program in the profession. “I didn’t have any thoughts about going into art at that point. The studio courses I took were all design-oriented.”

During a semester in his junior year, however, he had completed all the design courses that were offered. Without a class in the studio building, he found the semester lacking. A professor suggested an independent study in which Himmelfarb wouldn’t receive an assignment, but simply would draw and be evaluated periodically. It was a freedom he had never been given before.

“All of a sudden it was night and day. Within a couple of weeks, I was taking drawing seriously. I said to myself, ‘This feels right.’ Up to that point I didn’t think art was a moral choice: I considered it self-indulgent in a social action age. This was in the early ’60s. But then I felt this is what I have to do.”

Himmelfarb’s work is at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, and the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Bigger is better — at least according to curators J. Nebraska Gifford and Cathy Weiss in their show Blockbusters: The Big Impression, at John Nichols Printmakers, to July 26. Following the successful Intuition and the Block Print: A New York Obsession of 1984, Blockbusters features woodcuts and linocuts all 3×4 ft. or larger in size. Among the 21 artists included for bigness and boldness are Edward Brezinski, Richard Bosman, Red Grooms and Clayton Patterson, as well as non-New Yorkers Eric Averv, John Himmelfarb, and Joseph Raffael. Gifford finds that large-scale work is In tune with the times: “Ours is not exactly a period of nuance,” she notes in her essay for the accompanying catalogue. To order the illustrated catalogue, send $5 to J. Nebraska Gifford, 4 Great Jones Street, New York, New York 10012. To see these creations of inspiration and perspiration yourself, visit John Nichols, 83 Grand Street, New York. Tuesday-Saturday, 12-6.

John Himmelfarb’s works support many of the art dictums that motivated the abstract expressionists. Spontaneous registrations of the artist’s subconscious impulses and his uncontrolled thoughts make up the content, while many of the images spring from a private world of dreams and fantasy. Himmelfarb’s works herald the notion of the artist as a medium, whose concentrated creativity produces and energizes forces that arouse the viewer and conquer his soul. In this sense they also relate to the art brut of Jean Dubuffet and the automatic drawings of Andre Masson.

Although the works have a primitive quality, they suggest an intentionally formal direction which reminds the viewer that the artist is mediating between the forces at play. Thus, the formal sophistication of Bones and Balance Sheet is no accident, but surely the result of sharpened sensibility. The artist’s intrusion is controlled, however — if he persuades he does so gently, and his images at times seem like inert matter thinking about becoming alive. The communion between artist and work is so fine-tuned that neither integrity is inhibited.

The 12 paintings in this show compose a suite narrating the theme of regeneration. A cycle emerges which initially was not plotted by the artist, but which grew out of his social concerns. Himmelfarb uses a man in a boat to symbolize his theme, but the metaphor is left up to the individual to decipher.

However one chooses to interpret this metaphor, it infuses these works with a moral substratum that prophesizes man’s self-destruction and ends on a hopeful note of renewal. These densely-filled works suggest that man is crowding himself into oblivion with his possessions and inventions, not the least of which is the bomb.

Himmelfarb executed these works in black paint on unprimed canvas so adeptly that successive works graduate in tonality at a pace that flows like buttermilk. Despite their blackness, Blue Sky and Spring Green magically convey their titles. Slashing, swirling, curving lines, and brush strokes, resound with the artist’s creative energy.

Like his drawings and prints Himmelfarb’s paintings steal your heart away. Besides enjoying the sheer physicality of these works, the viewer is moved by the artist’s concern. Himmelfarb’s art makes a moral judgement which should momentarily relieve those who deride today s art for its lack of moral values and its narcissistic bent.

Price range: $300 to $3,800.

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