This year, we are honored to showcase some of Chicago’s best artists in our annual One Inspired Evening art auction. Our top three artists this year are Jacob Crose, Clausten, and Elise Hughes. All three are talented, fascinating artists and we look forward to introducing them to our supporters on February 28th. A little more about them:
Jacob Crose
Jacob Crose was born in Carbondale, IL In 1976, and has lived and worked in Chicago since 2002 . Jacob’s primarily medium is watercolor on tan BFK print paper, and his subjects often include objects, people, and/or animals with personal subtext. He received his BFA from Southern Illinois University in 2000 specializing in drawing and painting. Jacob has had works on display at Expo Chicago, Aqua12 Art Fair (Miami, FL), and currently has drawings at Front Room Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).
Jacob Crose applies ink and watercolor to colored print paper. An attempt is made to represent a sketchbook quality. This allows him to juxtapose his images and text in a way that uses the flatness of the unused portion of the paper resulting in a more personal composition. Jacob’s drawings include a cast of objects and/or animals, with the addition of text. The objects are often close to him, the animals are mostly chosen characters, and the text is autobiographical.
Clausten
Clausten is the unstoppable combination of Kirsten Fenton and Claude Panneton. They describe themselves this way:
“Friendship and artistic unity are the foundation of our art. We create to manifest our combined energies, similar passions, dreams and desires.
Our Inspiration is derived from one another with a deep-rooted need to understand comparable life experiences of our recent and distant pasts.
Our contemporary style combines the sentiments and stories of our respective poetic and photographic journeys.
Our collaborative process gives testimony to our desire for deep and meaningful human connection. Kirsten writes emotive poems, Claude devises a visual theme and we both take the photographs used to create the visual story.”
Elise Hughes
Born in the Midwest and later living in England Elise Hughes Yaworsky is an artist printmaker who has exhibited her work throughout the United States and Europe. She has participated in many invitational shows including Art Chicago, Art London, The Mini-Print International in Cadaques Spain, AAF New York, and Art Santa Fe. Collections include The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Leigh Block Museum of Art, IBM, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Sony Pictures as well as numerous private collections. Elise was also an invited artist at Big Cat Press in Chicago.
Inspired by her mother, an internationally know artist for her large scale woven sculptures and her father, a senior architect. Her early influences include the gardens of Cranbrook and the University at Birmingham, England where her father taught industrial design. Studying printmaking at Columbia College and receiving a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute Elise is versatile in multiple disciplines whose work has been used in fine art and visual merchandising contexts. Her prints successfully render an appealing abstract vision through the simple line and use of paper in an elegant minimalism.
Elise has taught printmaking, bookbinding, papermaking and floral design and lives in Wilmette Illinois with her husband and two sons.
She writes of her work,
“I am always working toward a balance of form, line, and color. By combining found papers, carefully tailored shapes, and etching, I create monoprints that navigate between nature and architecture and captures my passion for classical printmaking techniques and more modern experimentation. My early prints were experimental soft ground impressions with everything from found objects to delicate flowers, bold color and busy markings. Later I started building off the simple picture plane and positive and negative space. Currently my interest is more about the rhythm of line and the deliberate use of paper fragments to anchor and or extend the composition.”