Fish Creek's Edgewood Orchard Gallery hosts several featured artists each month throughout their busy summer season in Door County's rereational peninsula. This July and into August artist Craig Blietz displays his oil on linen painting Pastoral Dreaming, which recently won the Director's Choice Award at the Charles Allis Art Museum “2010 Wisconsin Forward Now” Exhibition. This same painting, along with an oil on linen triptych titled Clarity, will travel to Fort Wayne, Indiana, both images chosen for the Fort Wayne Museum of Art “2010 Contemporary Realism Biennial” from September 3 through November 7, 2010.
While Blietz graduated from the University of Denver, Colorado he also studied in Chicago and Europe, training with painters Fred Berger, Richard Halstead and John Rush. He continued in this tradition as an instructor at Chicago's School of Representational Art and the city's Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Currently represented by galleries in Michigan, Utah and Vermont as well as Wisconsin, Blietz settled to work and live in Sister Bay. Just a few miles from his home, Edgewood Orchard gallery presently exhibits nine oil on linen or panel images by Blietz. To study and observe more than the one piece shown at Milwaukee's CAM offers greater insight into the artist's creative inspirations. His urbane still life images define modern blocks of neutral color while comprised of antique objects Blietz enjoys collecting and painting.
In one small scale oil on panel titled Wall Talker, a stark still life rendering depicts only a vintage ceramic pitcher and two fresh eggs to the composition. A deep charcoal cloth runner hangs over the table edge they sit on, splitting the background into geometric planes. Claiming to be inspired by Jean Baptiste Chardin, Blietz's painting reflects timeless tradition and contemporary aesthetic serenity.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
A larger painting, Still Life With Watering Can, softens the edges to the objects and obscures the differentiation between foreground and background, still life and scene, shadow and shape, and the antique and contemporary. Even Blietz's masterful Wisconsin cows focus on shape and form, where the abstract patterns of the cow's coat plays against the shape of the animal's shoulders.”
In another painting, Blietz's five feet high by four feet wide figurative vision is defined only by the title K. Within the frame a full figure nude seen from behind stands against a wall hung cow's hide, once again referencing form against abstract black and white pattern that revisits the ancient while interpreting the organic into modern expression. A statement adjacent to the painting explains Blietz references the Greek Kouroi, depictions of male youth sculpted sometimes in honor to the deity Apollo or to pay tribute to the deceased, along wih the artist's desire to paint a figure from life instead of a photograph.
What and how will Blietz envision contemporary realism next? His painting Clarity departed from still life and farm life but yet fuses the abstract with the realistic. The tryptych features first an abstract atmosphere, then a representational horizon and sky followed by a Wisconsin fish species through a panel over six linear feet long. Perhaps this imaginative trip captured on linen represents a similar future for Blietz, uncertain and mystical but continuing in an artistic direction with expert clarity.
(To view Craig Blietz's art go to www.fwmoa.org, www. blietzstudio.com, or www.edgewoodorchard.com)
