"Eleanor Spiess-Ferris," van Straaten Gallery, Chicago, IL

The works of Chicago artist Eleanor Spiess-Ferris will be featured in the first exhibition of the season at the van Straaten Gallery, opening on Friday, September 14 from 5pm to 8pm. The show will be comprised of recent paintings and works on paper in addition to some works from the past several years. A participant in the 80th Annual Chicago and Vicinity Show of the Art Institute, Spiess-Ferris has exhibited throughout the United States and with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibitions program. After attending the Art Institute in the early 1960's, she subsequently returned to her native New Mexico and enrolled in the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she a BFA. Spiess-Ferris is a recognized Chicago artist, yet her work reflects a deep involvement with her background in the Southwest- a spiritual melting pot that offered her such diverse stimuli as the Spanish Penitentes, Catholic retablos, Indian kachinas and fetishes, along with a plethora of tales and ancient myths. Supplementing these memories with creations from her own fertile imagination, Spiess-Ferris seeks to captivate the viewer by using a combination of exacting technique and complex symbolism. The startling results of this fusion invite interpretation by the viewer: lively figures, half-female, half-swan, kick-dance across a lavish stage; fashionably dressed skeleton men have a night out on the town together; headless bodies sprout flowers and swing from a trapeze. Underlying each image is an undeniable sense of humor that makes the work all the more appealing. Like the Surrealists before her, Spiess-Ferris renders her scenes in great detail, ultimately confronting the viewer with a heightened reality. She juxtaposes the frightening with the beautiful, the known with the unknown, the real with the fantastic, calling to mind such influential masters as Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Paul Delvaux, and Renee Magritte. In addition, she is a versatile artist who is proficient in many media and can work effectively both as a draftsman on a small scale and as a painter of large works. Her ideas are developed first on paper with color pencil and watercolor, occasionally working into larger pieces on canvas or board.