On Sunday, January 19, 2025, The Loft on Main, 112 E. Main Street, Morrison, IL, opened its doors to the public at 1:00 p.m. for a special program. “Same Subject Matter, Different Artists and Different Mediums” began as a creative task for painters who sell their work at The Loft on Main, explained Sharon Boyles. She found this lush, floral print in her garage on W. Lincolnway. The home was built from 1880 to 1910, so this colorful art piece had been around for numerous decades.
Boyles asked five artists to use the print for inspiration; choose any medium; create their own version of this exuberant bouquet. On Sunday, one-by-one, they discussed their interpretation; process; style; materials; challenges of the task.
In the back row, Boyles holds the inspiration piece. Left-to-right are artists Suzanne Steward; Fran Plude; Loft Volunteer Pat McGarvey holding Sara Vanderkleed‘s “Fireworks for the Soul” abstract; Vernon Schaver. Joan Vander Bleek kneels in the front row.
Three artists struggled with the print’s odd background and radiating strokes of color. Likewise, foreground lighting and shadows, on the table in front of and beneath the floral container, were difficult to replicate. Steward painted a background hinting at the original print, then skillfully obscured most of it with her large-scale florals. Plude and Schaver “erased” the background. Vander Bleek changed it to a contrasting, flat black. Vanderkleed did not delineate a foreground/background presentation.
Steward said she had “not painted or drawn this last year. I have lots of flower photos on my phone, [and used them] as a reference. I inserted a few creatures. I put a gel medium on it to flatten the paper.
Plude stated, “It was a challenge! I didn’t care for the subject much, even though I talked to it a lot.”
Vanderkleed “was struck by the pop of color,” in the floral arrangemen, rather than individual flowers. She applied two quotes to the canvas; one said, “Yes You Can.”
Schaver “started drawing the flowers, but left them white; then I did the background. I came up with a color scheme that used neighbors on the color wheel. I was playing the warm [colors] against the cool. It forced me to work with all kinds of colors, seven or eight. I kept the white flowers and added red.”
Vander Bleek also found “it was a challenge. I don’t usually do flowers. I worked to do something baroque,” [including the black background.]