By Katy Coakley
Scott Wolniak, painter and instructional professor at the University of Chicago, has now released his new exhibition, Aggregations, with plenty of colorful paintings for guests to see.
The exhibit opened on Oct. 23 in the O’Connor Art Gallery and included paintings made through layers of abstract drawing, color staining and additive textures.
When he is painting, Wolniak said there are “multiple and different kinds of phases that each piece goes through.”
“I have been painting for a long time, so one project leads to the next and it’s a part of a long lineage of paintings and visual language I developed over many years,” he said. “Some [of the pieces] are about creating a pattern. I’ve drawn marks and shapes using graphite onto raw canvas. Once that is in place, I then start to respond to those elements by layering color to let [the pieces] evolve in process.”
He also said he wants people to find “visual pleasure” when looking at his different paintings.
“[I hope] it helps to increase visual sensitivity that might carry over into life and the outside world,” Wolniak said.
Wolniak has been painting since “the early 90s” and frequently drew many sketches throughout his childhood. He earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002. His work has been exhibited in collections for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee.
Frank Spidale, an assistant painting professor, said he thinks Wolniak’s gallery is great “for exhibiting painting” and a good place “for people to meet and talk to each other.”
“I love [Wolniak’s Watershed] piece all the way on the end [of the gallery],” he said. “I love the close tonalities of it. If you look closer, these details are just wonderful, [especially] with the textural elements [going] from thin to thick.
Spidale hopes painting students can learn the various skills Wolniak used to design his pieces.
“It’s nice to look at the paintings [and see] how the paint is used, [specifically] with the thin washes and thick tonalities,” he explained. “The application progress is really interesting for students to use. [They can also learn from] the variations of color for well-balanced paintings.”
Angelica Perez, a senior majoring in English, loved walking through the gallery and analyzing Wolniak’s different paintings.
“I went to [Nnenna Okore’s] exhibition before this one, so it’s cool to see the changes since [Okore’s],” she said. [The art gallery has] incorporated space a little bit more [for] the pieces.”
Perez said that her favorite piece from Wolniak was Allium,an acrylic canvas painting, because of the muted colors.
“The other paintings are very bright, but this one provides green and brown in between,” she explained.
The exhibit will run from Oct. 23 to Dec. 4.
kcoakley@my.dom.edu
