Treasurer's report
Sheryl reported that there are only enough funds left to pay the rent for September. She will finish the business plan and present it to the Village Board. She is concerned about asking the Village for more money without any membership interest, involvement or support. The board agreed that there needs to be more membership involvement because most of the responsibilities have been falling on the shoulders of the same 2 or 3 people and those individuals do not wish to keep up with all the demands themselves. Tina suggested sending out an email to all the members and explain that unless more members volunteer, the art league may not survive. The most important thing the art league needs help with is community events.
General committee news / planning
Tina and Sam will work together to organize the exhibits and discuss better ways to do them.
Wednesday the 13th the current exhibits art needs to be picked up by the members between 8 & 9 pm. Sheryl will ask Nancy D'Agostino to judge the exhibit on Wednesday. Nancy will be asked to arrive at 6:00 and the meeting will start at 7:00. Tina will get some ribbons or print out certificates to hand out as awards.
Saturday the 16th will be the drop off date for the new exhibit which will consist of all students work. Sheryl suggested changing the student exhibits title to "Favorite Project" because some parents have expressed concerns about finding art that their children have done in class that fits with the specific exhibits titles.
Student's exhibits will be hung according to age groups.
Cheryl, Marge, Tina and Sam will hang the art on Saturday the 16th.
Mindy will be stepping down from her position as Secretary. The board discussed a couple names to fill in until a permanent Secretary could be found. Mindy will continue to handle the membership until someone can be found to take that over.
Saturday the 23rd Mainstreet has asked the art league to do window painting in downtown Plainfield again from 9:00 am to noon. The theme is baseball. Sheryl said Mainstreet will give PAL sponsorship.
There are five people signed up so far for the William Band watercolor workshop.
Calls are coming in about September classes and about after school classes.
Sheryl said she will get an email out to the members about the William Band workshop, September classes, the upcoming demo, student's exhibit and the window painting.
Mindy Marge and Tina will call all the members that do not have email addresses and inform them of the important points for Sheryl's email.
Business was concluded.
General committee news / planning
Sheryl has volunteered to do the June demo. She will demonstrate how to work with fuzzed glass.
The park district is having a public meeting Wednesday June, 11th at 6:00 regarding the park across the street from the gallery. Sheryl asked if anyone would be interested in attending the meeting to learn about what the park district has in mind for the park. Colleen volunteered to go.
Cruise nights have started up again this summer. They are held every Tuesday night. The board discussed the possibility of having the gallery open during that time, but agreed that we need to see if there is anyone interested in being in the gallery at that time first so we will have a sign up sheet at the June demo to see if there is any interest.
The member's exhibit will be called "In the heat of the art". The exhibit will run from June 15th thru August 12th. Drop off will be on Saturday June 14th from 11 to 1:00 at the gallery. All members are welcome and can bring up to two pieces. Pick up will be at the Wednesday demo in August. Our July 9th program will be a member's picnic and pot luck with judging, a critique of the members work and awards handed out. Sheryl will put out an email to all the members about the July 9th picnic. Tina will update the forms that members will have to fill out for exhibiting in the gallery and she will send the forms out with a reminder of the demo before Wednesday.
The next exhibit that will go up in August will be a student exhibit. Anyone who has taken a class at PAL can exhibit their work in this show. District 202 summer students and JJC students may also be invited. August 16th will be the drop off day and it will be on display until Sept 10th. The show will be called "Hazy lazy days of summer student art exhibit". The board agreed that the non-member fee will be waved for the first student show.
Future shows will be:
Fall exhibit, Sep. thru Oct. – members exhibit titled "Fall Forward"
Holiday exhibit, Nov. thru Dec. – members exhibit titled "Celebrate Art"
Winter exhibit, Jan thru Feb. – members exhibit to get ready for AFA Best of Best show titled "PAL Best of Best" This show will consist of all the award winning art from all the previous shows and 10 pieces will be selected by judges to represent PAL in the AFA show.
Business was concluded.
JoAnn Deck's art quilts are not the heirlooms family members pass down through generations, but brightly colored abstract fiber collages.
"I'm not a person to work on a quilt for years. I like immediate results, to put my colors together and get the thing up on the wall," said Deck, 67, of Plainfield.
"Color excites me, big, bright swashes of color, not little prints and little designs. I'm more into futuristic stuff. I'm not into history and I think it carries over into art."
Having once owned a Harvard, Ill., fabric store, where Deck also taught quilting classes, Deck was familiar with fabrics when she discovered art quilts on the Internet.
Already a collage artist, Deck was excited about the possibilities of creating art on fabric, art that also did not require framing. Deck took a class and was instantly pleased with the results.
"I can create different lines and shapes just by the way I apply the dyes and the paints to the fabric and the way it travels through the fibers," Deck said. "Then there's the tactile nature. If you have a quilt hanging, people want to touch it. But if too many people touch it, they leave oil from their hands on the surface and that's not good for a piece of art."
Deck says she works intuitively, rarely sketching a first design before she begins. Nor is she afraid of experimenting with either color or fabric. She will often just throw paint on cloth just to see what happens. The paint that is available for fabric work is better than ever, she said.
"There are new and wonderful textile paints that do not change the hand of the fabric significantly," Deck said. "The cloth created with these paints, when used according to manufacturers directions, is so soft that you can easily hand-quilt it. For many years, acrylic paints were applied to fabric and, even though marketed specifically for fabric, left it stiff and rubbery."
Although she sometimes melts polyesters using a special gun, Deck nearly always prefers working with 100 percent cotton fabrics. To ensure just the right colors for her projects, she hand dyes and hand paints her work.
"I don't want to limit my choices," Deck said. "I love being able to have the right color I want on hand and not having to run out to the store to find it. I believe God has blessed me with a keen sensitivity to color harmonies, along with the ability to combine many diverse and unusual elements and techniques. My art pieces are built layer upon layer, technique upon technique, with intuitive and spontaneous development fueled by the colors and diversity of materials."
The art experience for Deck does not stop with creating art. Teaching it to others, she said, is a natural consequence of experiencing it.
For the last six years, Deck has taught a number of art-related courses at TLD Designs in Westmont, owned by her daughter and textile artist Tammy Deck.
Deck also accepts commission work; her pieces hang as part of many private and corporate collections, she said. Nearly everything Deck owns is or can be for sale if the right buyer comes along. There is, however, one piece she will not sell.
"It's a collage I did many years ago as a tribute to my stepmother when she died. It helped me get through the grieving," Deck said. "It's not a fabric collage, but a dimensional collage from things that were hers: a piece of her watch, the mirror from inside her lipstick container and her Washburn School graduation paper.
"I've exhibited it on occasion and for awhile I taught classes on how to make one.
"I told people, 'You bring your important stuff and I'll show you how to make a piece of art out of it.' But people want results that are vintage-looking and vintage isn't my thing."
To create this wide-angle image, Bessler took 14 different shots of the tulips, cut them into 10 36-inch square images and stitched them together.
He then printed them on canvas and created visible brush strokes on the flowers by painting them with clear acrylic. Because the photograph has so much detail, Bessler said he can print it again in any desired size.
"To me, this brings out the richness of the picture and makes it look more three-dimensional," Bessler said. "Some day -- maybe a long time from now -- I'll be able to print 3-D, but the best I can do right now is to add my texture on the outside."
For other photographs, Bessler "sculpts" them, by photographing many separate pictures of the same object and assembling them into one photograph by layering them. He used this technique with the images he took of his new pink rosebush.
"Sculpture has more depth, more shadows," he said. "Your eye just puts it all together and you don't see the spaces at all."
Bessler has shown his work at the Oak Brook Invitational and he has sold his pieces to both individuals and to corporations. Each year, he teaches photograph workshops at Starved Rock State Park in Utica.
Although both Bessler's father and uncle loved photography, Bessler said his call to the craft came at Lockport West High School (now Romeoville HS) when someone put a camera in his hands and told him to go take pictures.
"I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so I had to learn," Bessler said. "There weren't all those photography classes then." He apparently caught on fairly quickly. "I was the photographer for the 1968 yearbook. Almost all the photographs in there are mine and my friend's and we did all the layouts."
A full-time programmer and a part-time wedding photographer, the nature-loving Bessler evolved into a fine art photographer after he visited and took pictures of the Grand Canyon. He couldn't wait to get those images developed and relive that visual experience. But the resulting pictures disappointed him.
"The awe was just not there and that is when I resolved to learn how to bring home the awe," Bessler said.
He experimented first with enhancing the colors of his realistic pieces and later by creating impressionistic renderings of his images to give the feel of the original scene. Many of those images are quite large and have a sculpted feeling. Bessler now prints those images on either fine art paper or canvas.
Since he retired two years ago, Bessler has limited the number of weddings he will shoot each year to concentrate more on his fine art work. These are mostly nature pieces, especially flowers and waterfalls. The process of creating them gives Bessler immense satisfaction.
"My images are mine from the first look through the viewfinder of my camera, through the enhancing process and the printing," Bessler said. "Now I am feeling the awe."
