When Evanston’s Maple Avenue Gallery closed a month ago, artist Mary Barnes-Gingrich—who’d shown there for five years—lost the venue where she’d hoped to sell a suite of allegorical oils called The Four Seasons. The technique she’d used to create them (up to 20 layers of paint, building to a luminous surface) is straight out of the Renaissance, but the subject matter couldn’t be more personal: the series is subtitled “The Life of a Violinist,” and the lissome musician Barnes-Gingrich portrays at the mercy of the seasons is her daughter Dawn Gingrich, an emerging classical musician.
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The four paintings, each a four-foot square, took a year to complete, and Barnes-Gingrich’s family hadn’t wanted to part with them. But she was unhappy about keeping them hidden at home. “They need to be seen,” she said last week. “They need to be out in the world.” Maple Avenue was great for that, with its highly trafficked location in the Evanston Century movie theater complex (soon to house a sports bar). Faced with “a huge influx of paintings coming back into my house,” Barnes-Gingrich decided to donate The Four Seasons to the annual Recycled Art benefit at the Art Center in Highland Park, which opened July 31 and runs through August 15. There, if you’re fast enough, three of the four can be not only seen but purchased at less than a fifth of Maple Avenue’s asking price of around $2,500 apiece.
She never got the permanent symphony seat she wanted, but she kept a busy schedule as an extra player, supplementing or substituting with the Lyric Opera orchestra and the CSO. And she was able to pursue her other art, studying at the Evanston studio of Alain Gavin and at the School of the Art Institute with Ginny Sykes. She became a prolific printmaker as well as a painter, building a print shop in the basement of her home and turning the master bedroom into a painting studio where she could work all night when the spirit moved her. (She also shares a studio in Ravenswood.) In 1998, after playing a CSO concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall, she gave up the horn cold turkey to focus on her oil-painting technique.
Recycled Art is a world-class hodgepodge of paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculpture, books, magazines, jewelry, rugs, tchotchkes, and treasures. Rousso estimates that there were 4,000 items to start with, and says they’ve shaved prices in deference to the economy. There are hundreds of pieces that will go for less than $20, including a torpedo-shaped women’s rights collage by British artist Nicola Rowsell, a stash of Frida Kahlo-influenced portraits signed by a mysterious Federico, and a pair of figure studies of an old man by local artist Tricia Vail, who was surprised to hear that they were there.
Through 8/15: Mon-Sat 9 AM-4 PM, the Art Center, 1957 Sheridan, Highland Park, 847-432-1888, theartcenterhp.org.
