Sculptural Framing

“I’ve always been very conscious of the distance between reality and the mystery within the painting,” Wallace considers. Visit the studio and you’ll see this fascination played out in many ways in the artist’s work, from perspective to the placement of everyday objects within compositions, to the exquisite frames around some of the works, created from found objects.

“I trained myself to paint like a Renaissance painter,” Wallace explains. “I paint in very thin washes of color, building layer upon layer upon layer, and glazing. During the eighties, I was in the midst of a journey of discovery within my work. The symbolism I was using had begun to evolve, and as such so had the objects I was representing. In turn, even the way I applied the paint to the canvas was changing. When I started working more aggressively past those traditional bounds, I found that the paintings themselves had become violent - they moved faster, the colors swam, the brushstrokes vibrated. They had begun to take on a sense of movement. They started to fly off the canvas. I kept wanting to focus attention back into the painting, but I didn’t want to mute the imagery. I felt they needed to be contained somehow, and I considered how I’d frame them. I started out by simply holding up pieces of wood up to paintings to see what would work. Nothing quite made sense. I decided to build something.”

Along one wall at the studio reside a series of three paintings created by the artist during the eighties. The paintings are stunning – visceral, throbbing with movement. They’re surrounded by huge, sculptural frames of knotted wooden branches which seem to claw out into the space around them.

“My works are windows, they’re portals. I think of these frames like guardians – they’re figures, or sentinels that are standing at a threshold. They invite you to cross, or not, from reality into the mystery of the painting.”

Conversations with Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell
Image © The Dedalus Foundation, Inc.

During his time as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Wallace had an experience that would shape the way he thought about his career and life as an artist forever.

The artist, Robert Motherwell came to visit the university to give a series of lectures that coincided with his exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum. As an undergraduate in the painting department, Wallace was assigned by the school to chaperon Motherwell during his trip, driving him to appointments and lectures, and accompanying him on studio visits where he looked at the students work, including Wallace’s own.

People were all over him, clamoring to talk to him, asking him question after question about how to have a career as an artist, how to be successful. On the third day, he said to me, “Do you know Jonathan, you’ve never asked me anything. I’ve seen your work. Don’t you have any questions for me?”

I told him that I’d been listening, that I was taking it all in. Eventually, I said to him, “I know I’m still learning, but the truth is I don’t feel the work I’m doing right now is expressing my true self. I want to know how to do that.”

He looked at me. “But don’t you care about your career?”

I told him earnestly that I just wanted to figure out how to tell what I want to tell and say what I want to say.

Very quietly, Robert Motherwell turned and looked at me. Eventually he said, “Jonathan, don’t be successful. Don’t be like Jasper Johns and get discovered in your early twenties, because your life will be over.” He said, “Be like me—live your life, toil in obscurity until your seventies. Let it come to you. And if it doesn’t come to you, don’t care about it. Because your journey will be fuller and richer. I’ve had my whole life to be able to find out who I am and figure that out in my work and now it’s being given to the world. Hopefully that will happen to you.”

I don’t ever not think about that moment.

Tonight! Join us at Studio 2846

Please join us this evening, Saturday, April 6 from 5-10 p.m. for a showing of Wallace's latest work at his Chicago studio, across from historic Humboldt Park.

Click for details.

Join us at Studio 2846

Please join us the evening of Saturday, April 6 from 5-10 p.m. for a showing of Wallace's latest work at his Chicago studio, across from historic Humboldt Park.

Click for details.

Join us

The Story of Studio 2846: Part Five

This blog post is part of an ongoing series. Click to read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four

Over the next fifteen months, Wallace worked daily to renovate all four stories of the 20,000 square foot building by hand. In 1992, the space was finally complete, with his studio and living space spanning the top two floors, and the other two floors occupied by a total of 17 rental spaces.

Once settled in his new space, Wallace set about planning his first opening. After losing the New York gallery, he felt strongly that he needed to take control of his own destiny. “I didn’t need to rely solely on the galleries to show my work for me anymore – I had a beautiful new space, perfect for its purpose. I could show my work myself, in a way that illuminates them fully.”

“I was one of the first artists in Chicago to show my work directly from my studio,” he remembers. “People in the industry said it couldn’t be done. As an artist, the most you could do then was to open a gallery with a group of other artists and rotate shows. Showing your own work just wasn’t accepted.”

Wallace sent out 100 invitations to people he knew in the gallery and museum community, as well as collectors, artists and friends in the city. Of those 100 invited, only 12 showed up. “I sold one piece. It was hard. Everyone told me, this is why you can't do this.”

Wallace pushed forward, determined. Twice a year he opened up his studio to show his work. Each time, a few more people showed. Word spread, and soon each opening attracted about 80 people. “At first they were mostly friends and my older collectors, but then word started to spread and artists I didn't know would show up, new collectors who had heard from someone else about the studio would come, and before I knew it, over a period of 10 years, we had over 400 people at each event. Sales got progressively better, it created its own energy.”

Patricia Barber, a successful jazz musician and friend of the artist was interested in purchasing one of Wallace’s pieces. As part of the sale, they figured out a trade, and she and her trio began to play at one opening each year on the studio’s baby grand. The event increased again in popularity. “They were becoming so large as to be time consuming and expensive to throw, not to mention being too hard to talk with everyone about the work. We had so many people we hadn’t invited showing up. It was getting to be too much.” 

“The interesting thing is that when I would open up the studio, I noticed that people really look at the work; they spend time to try and decipher the language of the paint. I look around and see people talking in front of the paintings, or they’ll approach me to ask questions. There’s a connection without pretense that all too often doesn't happen in a gallery setting, where people feel they have to act a certain way, where they feel intimidated or afraid. It was truly a gift to me”.

In 2005, Wallace held one more studio opening, before heading to Montana to set about beginning to build his studio there.