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To volunteer as a docent at your local museum is to expand your opportunities to learn from both museum visitors and artists. Learning becomes fun.
Stacza Lipinski currently exhibiting at the Elmhurst Art Museum (May 2, -- July 26, 2009) studied as a painter through to her Masters In Fine Art. But this exhibit has little to do with paint. Instead she creates window installations from thousands of over-lapping hand-cut vellum in the shapes of pine cones, enlarged maple seeds and leaves, dandelions, etc. These shapes are her brush strokes. She is a painter after all
In the Elmhurst exhibit her shapes are from nature; and what shapes they are; filigreed, flimsy, darting, swirling, twirling, twisting, looping, churning, spinning, reaching across expanses within the Museum’s Miesean windows. Electrifying spontaneity and whimsy against Bauhaus grid.
Stacza first photographs the site of her new installation and pre-figures the number of shapes she may require. She then lays out her vellum sheets (vellum is a semi-transparent film) and throws acrylic paint across those sheets. For Elmhurst, she minimizes and controls color specific to each leaf, dandelion, and cone. After drying, Stacza turns over the vellum and begins to drawn in pencil her pre-envisioned shapes. From here dozens of hands help cut each shape with an X-acto knife.
It is on the site of the Museum that the shapes take on a second and a third life. Each shape is attached individually (and there are thousands of them) exploding along walls and along windows. Stacza calls them paintings, this writer calls them drawings, and others called her installations sculptures. You will have to decide for yourselves.
In lesser hands the focus would have been about “dead’ pine cones, dead” leaves, “dead” plants, the anxieties of an Age. Stacza’s focus is about “joy.” This painter moved her “brush” from the confined rectangular canvas onto walls and windows, and the community of Elmhurst and the Elmhurst Art Museum is all the richer for her exhibit.
Ida Kotyuk © 2009