Indianapolis Painter Ed Sanders in the 1980s

Evening, Ed Sanders, oil on board
AWI Collection, orig. acquired from the exhibit Ed Sanders - New Works, FLUX,
October 2006

A Thousand Words on Ed Sanders, Indiana Artist

An Indy artist, par excellence.

My research into a trilogy of Indianapolis art topics led me to a dusty manila folder in the newspaper archive section of the Indiana State Library downtown. I was looking into the origins of the Indianapolis art scene I had joined in the 1990s. Specifically the Faris Building art enclave at 546 S Meridian Street, and its precedent boom on Mass Ave, and the larger context of the overall contemporary scene that gave birth to both.  

Cursory and initial research into these topics at the State Library revealed three articles relevant to my study, and a common thread among them. 

Nan Hoffman's October 19, 1986 Indianapolis Star 'Art World' column, “Downtown studios ideal work space, say artists” contains resident and founding artist interviews and is accompanied by a photo of the east-facing entrance of the massive Morris Building as it was known in the '80s along with artists in their studio spaces.

Steve Mannheimer's Indianapolis Star 'Art & Leisure' section front page column February 26, 1989, “A sharing of art, but not a school” opines about a group of local painters, who share a Herron training and an association with the by then established Massachusetts Avenue gallery scene. Exceptional talent, if not a cohesive artistic sensibility or creed, was a common feature of the group Mannheimer discussed.

Finally, Marion Garmel's Indianapolis News 'Free Time' section front page article “Critic likes what he sees in Indiana art” provides enthusiastic coverage of the current scene and specifically the 1990 Indiana Arts Competition hosted by American States Insurance at 500 North Meridian. Theodore F. Wolff, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor judged the competition. 

Ed Sanders looms large in all three write-ups.

Serious meat.

Ed Sanders was slightly apologetic about the small studio space he rented in the Morris Building in 1986. He tells Indianapolis Star writer Nan Hoffman he needed a bigger place but can't afford it. “Maybe one day I'll move into a place with more room, but what I like about this place is that it's very private and lets me go about my work very seriously.” 

Sanders talks about his art materials to Hoffman. Huge oil paintings on plywood, combined with spray paint, caulking materials and more exotic items.  One work contained a real fish. Sanders explanation?

“I coated it with a lot of varnish so it doesn't rot.  I hope it works. It didn't with my last meat painting.” 

Something in the way he painted.

Ed Sanders' 1989 solo show at 431 Gallery was something. Something of a pinnacle of artistic achievement for the painter. Something of the soon to be global zeitgeist of grunge. Something of an almost tornado spinning in a circles attempting to form. Something of a cautionary tale. Whatever its something, it inspired Steve Mannheimer to write a column among his very best.

Mannheimer writes about what he sees as the show's most successful work Torso.  

“Tradition figure studies delineate bold musculature or delicate curve, express the vitality of gesture or sensuous grace. None of that for Sanders. He topples the torso...truncating the trunk, chopping the arms and spilling its guts out on the table.”

The strange workings of the light in Sanders' Torso (and other paintings) bedevils Mannheimer. He thinks out loud when he tries to explain the disconcerting effect. 

“Sanders paints a shrouded world, drenched in night or ashes. And the mass of shapes is too thickly painted and repainted, colored and recolored to allow any simple specific reading.”  

Mannheimer imagines an alternate read of the painting, if rolled on its side 90 degrees (like Sanders has  toppled his Torso).

“...the viscera bloom as flowers in a char-broiled Chagall. And like Chagall, Sanders' compositions float in a fog of melancholy...”

Mannheimer continues to reason with the dark and weight-less peculiarity of Sanders' work.

“As palpable and heavy, as grossly physical as these subjects are...no innate sense of gravity anchors them...Buoyed by the darkness, these subjects float across a range of interpretations.”  

And further, “These paintings hit the viewer like a punch in the face. The piled-up and scraped-down paint coagulates in oily, polychromed scabs.  If anything weighs upon these subjects, it is moral exhaustion. They collapse, not so much in defeat as in deflation.”    

The destabilizing impact and power of the paintings unleashes in Mannheimer thoughts beyond Sanders, his subjects, or his paintings. Mannheimer's thoughts are drawn to a negligent Indianapolis, careless or blindingly unaware of art treasures in its midst. Despite the anguished and existential screams of its best talents, despite a purported bridge to somewhere, a land-locked city sleeps.

“Indianapolis may not exactly be oblivion, although it has too often appeared oblivious to artists like Sanders.” 

A Two for Won.

Although Steve Mannheimer was reticent to declare a contemporary 'school' or identifiable movement in the Indianapolis art scene of a little over a year prior, Indianapolis News columnist Marion Garmel declared such an arrival in her column in the summer of 1990. Her remarks were based on the critical success and growing reputation of group of working artists, mostly Herron grads from the early '80s, who had exhibited at a by then defunct Lyman & Snodgrass Gallery, and the artist-operated 431 Gallery on Massachusetts Avenue. Their new association was the recently formed Indiana Artists' Forum which had a show of work at the new Hindman Gallery at Geist.

The best among them were represented in the exposition '1990 Indiana Arts Competition' at the American States Insurance Company headquarters downtown. 

About the Indiana art he chose,  the show's judge, Thomas F. Wolff of the Christian Science Monitor, said that the work “would hold up well almost anywhere.” The resulting exhibition he describes as “of very real quality, range and depth. I am particularly pleased with the award winners.”

In a personal conversation with Wolff, Garmel quotes the the judge about his unusual selection of not one, but two paintings, as best of  show. Both were by Ed Sanders.  Wolff said simply, “he's a cut above.”  It is an interesting way to describe an artist, head above the rest, one of whose winning paintings was the infamous, dismembered Torso. 

Through a desert in a school with no name.

Marion Garmel seems intent on naming the unifying feature of the high and rising Indy art movement she proclaims in 1990. She seems at a loss for words though. She names not what its members share, but what they avoid. No easy, no cutesy, no bland, she sums up, about those invited to Wolff's party. It's almost a punch line about the prior movements of Kelly, Warhol and Judd or the future AI photoshop age, but she makes the point.  

Suffice to say, it's a difficult business – the discovery, the elucidation and the coining of 'schools.'

Steve Mannheimer wrestled with the same damned predicament in his Ed Sander's Torso column. It's like he yearned for the perfect word to describe all the great Sanders-like artists around.  He did a good job wondering about their “gritty edge of despair,” their “hands-in approach to the paint,” their “sense of hooded light in cramped spaces,” and their “grappling with uncertain personal metaphors.”  Mannheimer is brilliant here, and unparalleled, in his writing on this subject. 

The searching words of his fretful dissertation could  end with the maxim he used at the start of the column. His early words say it perfectly.

“Before there is history and before there are styles, there are individual artists like Ed Sanders mucking about with that oily aroma on their clothes and canvases.”  

And whether or not history will recall, or for how long, oil paint always smells the same.  

Mark Diekhoff,  July 2025

See also: Ed Sanders - Life and Art  - partial catalogue of 2014 posthumous retrospective at Herron School of Art and Design 

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John Wesley Hardrick – 'Through the Eyes of an Artist' at The Indiana State Museum

A Thousand Words on John Wesley Hardrick.

 

John Wesley Hardrick at Indiana State Museum

Interesting works by John Wesley Hardrick have popped up at auction in Indianapolis over the past several years. Knowing little about the artist I was happy to come across notice of his Indiana State Museum exhibit shortly before its end June 29.  

The show's  arrangement is both beautiful and thoughtful. Paintings, both large and small, grouped in a way to tell the story of Hardrick's long life in dedication to his art.  Its title promises a showcase of the vision of the artist. It actually delivers so much more. Not only the amazing sights captured in his paintings, but also an insightful revelation of his person. 

John Wesley Hardrick "Through the Eyes of an Artist"
Indiana State Museum, left to right - Thou Good and Faithful Servant 1930, Portrait of Irvena Harvey Ming 1929, Going Fishing c. 1940s, Hay Wagon on the Farm 1935, and Hale Woodruff's 1960s Unknown Title landscape

 

Innovative Eyes, Virtuoso Touch.

We see in his landscapes that Hardrick developed his own vocabulary for color. For me, it's as if he saw the world, not color blind or predefined by tradition, but color enhanced, as if pulsating with some magical lifeblood.  His palette seems to includes hues not only on our own visible spectrum, but maybe infrared or ultraviolet too.  The dark brown of his exposed board support (he rarely paints on canvas in the show), the deep navy blue of the shadow of trees and foliage. His areas of brightest light are green – a neon in the trees, caused by the mixing those dark blue shadows and yellow he used as highlights. It dazzles, its mixing, as if charged by electricity. Overhead, his clouds with patches of sea green, caused, again by his melding the same colors, but diluted with white, more subdued, less charged, more ethereal like the sky. 

detail Hay Wagon on the Farm, John Wesley Hardrick

By varying the tone of these colors from foreground to deepest distance, his enlivens his landscapes with tangible depth.  Follow your eyes, you can walk right into them.  

And the path is often clear. It's right down the middle. For Hardrick also has a signature preference in landscape composition that deviates noticeably from the classic golden ratio seen in tradition. At least in many of his paintings in this show. Like a stage play before our eyes, his scene is flanked and curtained in a balance on either side, with an action that opens in the center. It engages like a soft subliminal vortex, to draw the eye in. 

This is demonstrated by comparing the famous John Constable painting, The Hay Wain, 1821, which uses the classic golden rules methods to meander the view from side to side and front to back across its image. You see Constable's wagon at first glance, but are quickly drawn away down the road and along the stream, back and forth, in a zigzag to the depths of the painting. This traditional composition is also seen in the late landscape painted by Hale Woodruff, (Title Unknown), c. 1960s that hangs in Hardwick's show.  Woodruff's cottages in the lower left draw you into a bright center, that pulls back toward a bright pink, and finally back again to a golden distance.  

Woodruff, most known for his late 1930s Amistad murals in the Talladega College library, shared space with Hardrick and they advertised art lessons when their paths crossed in Indianapolis back in the late '20s. 

Hardrick's Hay Wagon on the Farm, 1935, parts a sea of trees like Moses to reveal a hay wagon and worker, not to grab at attention, but as a main event. You bask in its central scene. The yellow glow of noonday hay, a horse whose only respite is its own cast shadow. The hardworking man and his pitchfork has no shelter from the sun. The American Scene, the regionalist ethos of dignity, labor and the common man, but with Hardrick's unique romantic touch and perspective.

Hay Wagon on the Farm, John Wesley Hardrick

Additional landscapes in the show have this centralized composition as well, such as Winter River and Cabins with a sapphire creek ripping a glacial crevasse through the center of the picture. And Salt Lick Creek, in which the endless days of summer seem to live in youthful splendor beyond the red autumnal leaves at each side. In the center, as if to reiterate the impression, not a hint of leaves changing color are reflected on the eternal river's sheen.  

Winter River and Cabins, John Wesley Hardrick

 Blue Lagoon, 1935, again, has a systematic up/down, left/right balance that leads to the exact center of the picture. The shade ends there, as does the mere reflection of sky upon the water. A sun dazzled beach at the end of the lagoon. There is something sublime, something Caspar David Friedrich, about being placed at the epicenter of numinous beauty. 

Similarly, in (Title Unknown) Waterfall with Figures, an immense, powerful waterfall dominates the center of the picture, craggy rocks shore at the sides. A tiny group of figures are so infinitesimal in the composition, they are nearly lost in the  spectacle of water.  Effortless, casual strokes sketch in three anatomically precise people, amazing in their two-tone simplicity. The artist's secure feel for his brush is evident in his brushwork. And while your eyes are honed in, look up the river. There is nothing smaller than infinitesimal except for the second group of figures way down the way. Impeccably painted. See, people gather, then they gather again, in groups of three, visual echos, in a Mandelbrot journey up the river of life. Or maybe just a great fishing spot Hardrick happened upon. But it's hard to imagine catching anything with a current running so fast. Other than what Hardrick caught in his untitled painting– a tour de force of a view.  

detail (Title Unknown) Waterfall with Figures, John Wesley Hardrick

Handshakes, Hugs, and a Heart for Heavy Lifting.

The portraits, the people pictures by Hardwick in the exhibit show not only a variety of sitters and situations, but also serve as insightful snapshots of aspects of the artist himself. The show's curator has accomplished a wonderful narrative in the placement of the paintings. 

We see in them, the ever story of Hardrick's love of family and community, his faith, even pastimes he enjoyed. And the broad societal milieu that opened up to him as a gifted artist, that likely would have remained out of reach to a taxi cab driver, which he was as well at times, to put food on the table. 

Hardrick was not your everyday cabbie, though.  In a world of interesting people and wondrous sights, he was an artist-injected one. Sketchbook with him, equipped and ready to transcend the daily grind, and capture quick portraits of passengers or landscape motifs that caught his attention along the way between fares.

We see in Indianapolis Street Scene such a sight.  As if caught from his taxi cab glance in the middle of a downtown intersection, a honey-dipped scene mesmerizing in its golden wind. Three people again – Hardrick sees a group of three.  A trinity of windblown saints just trying to a cross the street. The inexplicable epiphany of artists,  marvelous to behold.

detail Indianapolis Street Scene, John Wesley Hardrick

Hardwick's portrait of his neice Trili, 1942, shows a girl, pretty in a fancy pink dress and bow, painted  with the swift and sure handling we see in his floral subjects in the show. The puffy bow, her frilly skirt could be peony flowers at full bloom. To paint flowers best be swift and sure, they fade quickly, just as sure as the girl will blossom into a young lady in the blink of an eye. 

Such a woman is revealed in the stunning, society-type painting Portrait of a Young Lady.  The painting's sophisticated composition of extended side-view of body, but with head looking over the shoulder at the viewer, is a bit Egyptian. It recalls in my mind the unfinished painting by Jacques-Louis David, begun in 1800, of a young lady I remembered as Josephine Bonaparte, but was actually a Madame Récamier. Cascading fabric of beautiful gowns, a long bare arm on each lady extended to the knee. Elegant bare neck and an allure of indifference in the eyes. Hardrick's sitter is unnamed, but perhaps someone with recall something in some visual memory somewhere that will rediscover who she is. Until then, she is the blossom of a debutante, a quinceanera, of girl to young lady, universally.

detail Trili, John Wesley Hardrick

Outward Reaching Hands.

In 1927, Hardrick's painting Little Brown Girl won the second prize in in the fine arts category in a competition sponsored by the William E. Harmon Foundation, noted in its support of  African-American arts. It delights with the colorful exuberance of Matisse or Derain. 

Little Brown Girl, John Wesley Hardrick

The award winning painting was a source of pride and joy for Hardrick's Indianapolis faith-based and artistic communities and they united efforts to fund the purchase of the picture and its eventual donation in 1929 to the John Herron Art Institute (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields). 

Almost 100 years later, belated, this show.

And a current artist, Mason Archie, who follows in the footstep of those before, as we all do, every step.  His The Road Less Traveled #12, 2020, has Hardrick's gleaming golden road, but not in a city center, but a country landscape of a type loved by both men. It's not golden by a rule of composition, but it's golden in the glow of the sun on its bare rutted dirt.  The tired tracks of tires or wagon wheels, or just people walking side by side.  The golden sunset, or is it dawn, of an artist on the road.

Mark Diekhoff, June 2025

John Mellencamp, First Paintings – Art World Remembers

Whenever We Wanted II, John Mellencamp (c) 1992 

The Demise and Birth of Whenever.

In January of 1993, George Bush, the father, was vacating the White House and Bill and Hillary were moving in.  On the Billboard Top 100, despite the seismic success of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit from a year earlier, and the grunge mania that followed, Whitney Houston's version of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You was No. 1.

In the heartland here in Indiana, there is a farming mindset about the changing state of things. Farmers keep a close watch as the climate moves over and storms past them, like seasons everyday, or a year of summer in the course of one week. So ubiquitously fickle and unpredictable, and yet somehow, always the same. Heartlanders say 'don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes, it will change.'  They think it's a local saying, but actually Mark Twain said it, and not about hereabouts, but New England. It may have been and old adage young Sam Clemens had picked up as a kid in Missouri. Who's to say, really? 

John Cougar had a saying the year I graduated high school. 'Nothing matters and what if it did.' It's not a question. It's a statement, with fightin' words attached. For me, just a Hoosier kid, I thought he was cool. His first self-titled record on the Riva Records inspired me to buy my first pack of Winstons and go to college in Miami. 

Throughout the 1980s, John Cougar cycled through the last of his name changes, and phased out Cougar for good. He picked up the classic paintbrushes and easel, and as a newfound visual artist made news in the city papers here in Indianapolis. A music video for a track from his album Whenever We Wanted, 1991, showed his performance surrounded by paintings. The same paintings filled the cover of the CD, as well. And like the Beatles inspired a wave, of not only fans, but musical followers and wannabes, John Mellencamp, at that time, with all that artist stuff, awakened in me, a feeling of both abandon and embrace, a want to go that wherever way he went.

A Leg Up Artist.

Whenever We Wanted was the first album released under the name John Mellencamp and Get a Leg Up was its first single released. On the record's cover and starring in the music video was a long-legged, blonde temptress and model, Elaine Irwin. She would become both artistic muse and wife to Mellencamp by January 1993.

The music video shows Mellencamp primped and performing his new song with Irwin cavorting about,  before a backdrop of large framed paintings. One of those paintings, American Boy and Girl, 1991, is a dual head and shoulders portrait of a hippy/hipster pair, dark haired, dark eyed, flat affect mostly, a little more edge to the eyes of the girl. There is a snugly luxurious feel to Mellencamp's empty red background. It has no feeling of sterility or vacancy despite the lack of anything but painted color. 

Mellencamp is quoted as saying  the Whenever record was an attempt at Hurts So Good with better lyrics. 

A fan had suggested he get back to his basic sex and rock and roll after a couple previous more socially aware records. Whatever.

Two other paintings behind the pop singer share their name with the album. Not sure which came first, the paintings or the album. Maybe all just a part of a theme he was exploring, whether visually or with music, at that time. Or were the paintings nicknamed with place keeper titles simply for their central inclusion in the record's cover and 1st video set piece? Probably a theme, not that it matters, but let's embrace the wonder.

The hurts so good of love and sex, but with better poetry.  The paintings can't be explained by the phrase 'whenever we wanted,' but by some riddle of a question, to which Mellencamp replies in song and in paint, that answer. 

Whenever We Wanted, 1991, shows another couple, maybe it hurts, maybe it's good, depends on a lot of things.  The girl is probably American as she looks to be the same dark-haired girl in the painting already described. She is seated nude (at least topless behind a table)  within a theatrically contrived space. She is extending one arm, bent awkwardly at the elbow, holding up an apple of temptation. She stares straight at the viewer. The standing, sandy-haired male at her side, dares not look over at her, rather he too, looks at the viewer.  His elongated figure, accentuated by the twin curves of suspenders he wears, seems to slink toward the painting's edge. He may have asked her when she started seeing that other one on the side, and well, we know the answer.

Whenever We Wanted II, also 1991, a domestic bedroom scene of man and woman on a bed. The male is most certainly Mellencamp himself. And if the femme fatale is not Elaine Irwin, then Mellencamp had a premonition of being existentially intimate with a look-a-like blonde.  The painting is the exact size of the other Whenever..., but that one is a vertical and this one is a horizontal. The wider view works with this image as Mellencamp has painted the gaze of both persons looking as far away from the other as possible.  And the feeling is amplified by the format. But what question is that feeling?

Both paintings share the same color scheme as well. It's almost a Rembrandt palette of golden brown, deep maroons, wood tone and flesh. In this picture, the Mellencamp character, nude, leg crossed over his privates, picks at his toenails. The Irwin character is a head floating on pillow, blonde hair cascading, lump of body entirely cocooned in the thick bedspread of curtain that drapes the scene oppressively. The only two objects other that those described, are a cross round the man's neck, and something on the night stand towards the outward gaze of the woman. What it is though, hard to tell.

Ewing Street Incident.

It's strange now, I cannot remember how we traveled in those days. But on a winter afternoon, in early 1993, I found myself at the Southern Indiana Center for the Arts just north of Seymour, Indiana in a town called Rockport. I'm sure I read about the show in the Indianapolis papers, but it was before GPS and before the internet and I wasn't familiar with the town. But I found the old mansion, easy enough, set back from Highway 11. An exhibition called simply John Mellencamp was showing from January 8 through 28.

John with Puppet, 1992, was the painting teased in the newspaper, and was presented as a large show stopper near the entrance. Mellencamp paints himself in the light and posture of a Mannerist saint, a grim puppeteer dangling his marionette from one hand and teetering a cigarette from his lips.  The hollow eyes of his tiny plaything, and his own jaded view cast to opposite sides.  The ambitious scale of the painting, the tone of its feel, seem to aspire to the summative quality and mysterious pathos of a piece like Picasso's La Vie at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Two pictures to discuss together are Stella and Kristi Blindfolded, both 1991, both the same size, and both a head and shoulders nude portrait of a redhead woman with short cut hair. One an immense success and the other a heavy handed metaphor. 

The blindfold occurs more than once in Mellencamp's paintings, not always used in the same way.  In Kristi, the blindfold is the type we see on hostages. Hers is not masquerade. She's no coquette with a playful veil. Kristi seems a brutal caricature of victimhood. Like the title of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes,  the painting is heavy on the scary, and lyric-lite.   

Articles around the time of this Mellencamp exhibit cite German Expressionist Max Beckman and American painter Walt Kuhn as key influences.  If Kristi is more Kuhn, then Stella is more Beckmann.

Or maybe more Ernest Ludwig Kirchner than Beckmann. Stella has the jarring and angular line of Kirchner. Mellencamp does it, though, without the camp cabaret of Kirchner's era. Stella, although enervated and jaggy, is a woman of real flesh and blood. You never doubt this lady was seated before Mellencamp, his paints and brushes, just being rather than pretending to be.   

With this line of thinking in mind, Untitled, 1991, whose attractive blonde subject with long hair and red dress, standing partially behind a filigree architecture of some sort, stands expressionless as if sleeping with no dreams.  Your Mother, 1991, is back to the prop department, for something Tarantino again, like a gimp. Mellencamp paints his memories or our collective unconscious, a leather belt to go with this archetypal 'mean mom.'  

Somewhere in between fact and fiction, Jocko, 1990, succeeds. Again, I go back to an aspiration of  intent. Some of Kuhn's clowns have it. And Mellencamp's whatever he is, this Jocko – a horse-drawn carriage driver – Napoleonic cannon fodder – drum major – elevator boy – not really sure.  Something about him is beyond  stereotype and toward the universal, even if he ain't there yet. I'm reminded of this intent in Picasso again. His Boy with A Pipe from the rose period. A whole art history really of youthful portraits that capture some of the beauty and magic of life before time has had time to take its toll.

The minimal facepaint on Jocko points toward a clown or circus of some kind, regardless of whatever the hell else he is. And aren't we all, a clown or circus sometime, regardless of who we are?

Jocko, John Mellencamp (c) 1992 

See Also - Mellencamp - Selected Paintings, 36 page catalogue (c) 1992 John Mellencamp

Boy with Pipe - Pablo Picasso

Review of 'Stories of the Salon' Companion Exhibit to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon

Booth Tarkington Portrait  by Wayman Adams? from Stories of the Salon

A Thousand Words on Stories of the Salon. 

Running at the same time and in an adjacent room to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon, The Indiana State Museum presents Stories of the Salon from August 24 through October 20, 2024.

From several impressive, French Salon-scale paintings by Hoosier Group artists such as T.C. Steele, Wayman Adams and William Forsyth, who exhibited in the early years of the annual exhibit when it was still held in Chicago, to recent scenes and visions by this century's artists, the companion show presents a visual narrative of the evolution and variety of many of Indiana's great artworks and artists.

Deliberate Men and Their Noble Vocation.

A massive, even monumental, floral still life by William Forsyth encapsulates the dark, severe and Victorian tastes of the art buying public around the first quarter of last century. It's easy to imagine the painting looming aside a dark dining room table amid thick florid drapery, intricate and ornate carpets and wallpapers, clusters of  bric-a-brac, and the dim glimmer of china and crystal. Lost in an enveloping clutter, the painting itself and its subject floral, vestiges of color and reflection, overwhelmed by a dark palette of background suffocation. 

Brighter, and less time-trapped, but of an equally monumental scale is The Hill Country by T.C. Steele from the 2nd Annual Salon, 1926. A close inspection reveals Steele's use of the entire color wheel spectrum from yellow to violet in the sky, red ochre to green in the pleasing roll of Hoosier hills, orange in the fore to blue in the aft of his stately composition. Steele's abundant and joyful hues are both delirious and delicious, attributes befitting his impressionist ways. 

The famous Art Jury by Wayman Adams, is a near life-size, multi-portrait of huddled, standing men and is included as well. It was also shown in the 2nd Hoosier Salon. In the magnificent picture, he presents the history of his subject in a neighborly way like a Normal Rockwell front porch conversation of sideways glances and under the breath gossips. You sense a dynamism of mischief and competition among the men he portrayed, the titans of Indiana art at the time, as they choose the winners from the others in their art show deliberations.

Pioneer Women of the Morris Scene.

Three artists who all once practiced their craft as pioneers within the confines of the spacious Morris Building artists' enclave on South Meridian Street (later called the Faris Building) can be seen within several feet of each other at the exhibit. Sky Rider, by Lois Main Templeton was in the 67th Salon in 1991. The painting is discernible from her later work in the '90s, in that it is smaller, more buoyantly colorful, and is less purely abstract. It does possess her signature touch of gesture and action, and her bold use of line. The yellowish block in the golden triangle area of the work would become a predominant color in years to come.  

The Leaders by Ellie Siskind from the 1986 Salon, presents the namesake subjects as comic book grim reapers. The simplicity of the overall imagery, the candy-wrap colors and the five figures' deathheads are reminiscent of Mexican Day of the Dead sculpture. Perhaps world leaders they are, as the sole female among them sports a blouse that seems like a nod to Margaret Thatcher, one of the others is dressed in a military outfit and cap that recalls Saddam Hussein, and either of a couple of other wrinkly necks could easily be Ronald Reagan under a mask. Somehow this painting survives its own wiffs of propaganda, as we whistle by its graveyard, maybe due to the allure of the lurid hues and the playfulness of its shock.

The final of the three, is a  sculpture Fragile Shards / PTSD by Clare Hollett from the 99th Salon in 2023.  The work's title alludes to mental health and its stark color contrasts of black porcelain base and white ceramic shards present a bipolar unease of their own. The shards are irregular facets repelled from the core, not ordered and unfolding like blossoms, but adverse like magnetic repulsion and entropic like explosion or flame. Or appearing actually, like a box of Kleenex, sneezed at from within.

The Capture of Mid-Century Escapism.

On another section of wall are three works which hang well together. All offer mid-century views of one type or another. Harley W. Rhodehamell III, by Marie Goth, was created and shown in 1964 at the 40th Hoosier Salon. The delightful child's portrait shows a polite young cowboy, sitting up straight, attentive, hands crossed in his lap and dressed for a gunfight if given permission. He wears a getup of suede riding pants and vest, baby blue stetson, and pink button-down shirt peaking from a dark gray longsleeve v-neck like a rakish bandanna around his neck. His trusty cap-gun hangs by the ready, its belt and holster slung over the back of chair at his side. With the passage of time, the artwork operates on dual levels. The painting itself is impeccable, the relaxed handling perfect for the portrait of child.  But looking at its innocence with the jaded focus of modern eyes now raises questions. At what cost, all this wish-fulfilled excess of the TV age generation? And how on earth did it come to pass that the endearing picture of this boy escaped from the family's collection? 

The Barber's Chair by William Burton Lawson was included in the 2007 exhibition. The painting appears a time capsule the artist stumbled upon. A composition, through storefront plate-glass, that is worth more than a passing glance. A tan leather barber's chair at the center, rubbed shiny on its edges from wear. It has a massive chrome footrest, that, like the grill on a '50s Buick, seems a menacing grin or grimace. It's not really a stretch to say that the chair is endowed with an air of personage. It holds court with a surrounding overflow of interesting sidekicks and characters. Barstools from the Happy Days with foot rings for the tired feet of jazzy drinkers, a rocket age pedestal ashtray, linoleum floor and enamel cabinetry from a color-blind era in yellow and brown. Some Polaroids and a massive taxidermied fish on the gray paneled back wall.  A leaning broom, a Fedora hat. The carefully painted items are endless and intrinsic. A familiar red gumball machine, but empty.  The ashtray, the chairs, a trash can, all empty. A modern cheap plastic fan, its blades stopped.  Is that a reflection in the ornate mirror behind the barber's chair...? Maybe not. But a few clumps of hair on the floor hint at the quiet humanity of it all. The artist knows a composition and color scheme when he sees them. And in this time-trapped tableau, his meticulous hand preserves all of the colorful details for those who didn't take time to notice in real time. 

In an entry from 2001, Angel Mercado presents a sunsoaked fishing cottage that is reminiscent of the the East Coast lights of Edward Hopper. But only in the sunshine they share. Hopper was a post-war existentialist despite the occasional glow, but his early colorful row house pictures have the feeling you feel in Mercado's picture. We seek isolation as a tonic for the stress of city life. And Mercado's scene is splendid in that way. Pure sunlight and cool shadow in a harmony of mutual compliment. Primary color fields of blue sky, red roof and yellow grass are equally as melodious in their equitable distribution over the picture plane. The verve of the paintbrush, dashes out a row boat with minimal strain, a couple of blocks of black shadow, and a sweeping curve of white. The glee of existentialism, hold my beer.  

The Mysterious Amberson Age.

Booth Tarkington's coming-of-age novel Seventeen preserves an Indiana long gone, but contemporary to the times that spawned the first Hoosier Art Salon, one hundred years ago.   Before all the widespread store bought snacks, there was bread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Before there were several cars in every driveway, there were trolleys that linked far flung places like Irvington to the city, and at a conversational, leisurely pace. 

A magnificent seated Portrait of Booth Tarkington is included in the show. It presents the imposing man with trademark leather gloves and cigarette. Unfortunately, I did not note the artist or the year during my visit to the show. An online search revealed a photograph in the W. H. Bass Photo Collection with a similar pose. Different Tarkington portraits are in the collections of Smithsonian and Newfields. The bravura handling of the piece in the Stories of the Salon show is in the manner of  William Merritt Chase or Robert Henri, so perhaps it was  Wayman Adams, but he's already represented in the aforementioned Art Jury. But he did present a Tarkington portrait in the first Hoosier Salon in 1925. So perhaps it's an Adams, or a student of Adams or of William Forsyth, who also painting with a similar skill and abandon. Simon Paul Baus comes to mind, but perhaps his brush is looser yet.

In the gilded heyday of Hollywood, as Tarkington's Ambersons brightened cinema screens, Cecil Head was painting a meek and sober lamplight on a depression streetscape in our city. Street Corner at Midnight was exhibited in the 1942 Salon. A red brick corner store or bar, second floor apartments, sidewalks empty, all but rolled up. One parked automobile blends into the shadows of everything outside the lamp's midnight glow. The darkest shadows reserved for what lies beyond windows and door.

 

Mark Diekhoff,  June 21, 2025

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Thoughts on the Closing of Ruschman Gallery

AI image by Gemini for illustrative purposes only

originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal, 06/24/09

Mark Ruschman's One Helluva Ride

About a month ago, I ran into David Kadlec, who used to run Eye Blink, a gallery in the Murphy Art Center. As two former gallery guys, the subject was showing art. He asked me if I ever thought about opening up a new place. It wasn't really a question maybe, probably just small talk. Truth is, I think about it quite often still — even though next year marks ten years since I closed my final commercial space. Besides Grateful Dead concerts and great stuff I did as a kid, running an art gallery was the most fun I’ve ever had doing something.

I told Kadlec no. I remarked that the local scene had changed. Things — the world — had moved on. “They don’t even do solo shows anymore,” I said. Kadlec reminded me, “Ruschman still does solo shows, doesn’t he?”

I first saw Ruschman Gallery in 1992 or 3, just before I walked a couple doors down to Bill Adkins’ In Vivo art gallery when they were still neighbors on Massachusetts Ave. By then the Indy ‘golden age’ of contemporary art was arguably ending. A 'phase two' was sorting itself out with In Vivo closing and Ruschman relocating to the slightly more remote and exclusive situation on Alabama Street. Hot House and Four Star were on the horizon.

I recall just one art detail from that day — a large calm Steve Paddack painting leaning against a wall in an upstairs storage room at In Vivo. It was a painting of a corner of an empty room leaning in the corner of an empty room. That painting, in that place, inspired me to take up paint brushes myself and open a gallery that might see fit to have such large impossible things inside and even hang them on the wall.

I didn't visit Ruschman Gallery often. Perhaps just a handful of times over all those years. Ruschman's activities were covered thoroughly in the art press though — spanning Steve Mannheimer all the way to Konrad Marshall — so you could keep up with his vision whether you saw it in the flesh or not.

When I had a gallery, I noticed all the young local artists aspired to be with Ruschman. Clearly he was able to balance business with beauty better than anyone else in Indianapolis.

At that time, in my young and dumber days, I found Ruschman Gallery ‘safe’ with its stable of regional academics. Keep in mind I was just an up and comer, trying to distinguish myself somehow. Hard knocks later, I grew to admire his long run business model. It contrasted so clearly with my crash and burn through the savings five-year plan. Ruschman’s was the tougher way, the road less traveled in the long haul, as my highway was littered with not only the wreck of my Five Ten Gallery, but with the rusting hulks of prior makes like 431 and In Vivo, and the accidents waiting to happen still on the drawing board — Oblique, EM Gallery, LAMP, Eye Blink, Everyday Inventors, Penumbra, FLUX and more. I'm not insulting us flameouts, just attesting to the dependability and durability behind Ruschman's nameplate.

Ruschman was always the standard. Others maybe wanted to be more experimental than Ruschman. Have bigger walls than Ruschman. Have more young artists than Ruschman. More 'laid back' atmosphere than Ruschman. More sculpture, more installations. More music, more themes, more chainsaws of death, whatever. In reality though, probably — just be the next Ruschman — certainly in terms of success.

We beg for change, and then it comes. The Murphy Building is for sale — IMOCA’s fired the paid staff and is tightening its belt— some Indy artists who have 'chose to stay' have finally gotten an exhibit at the Indiana State Museum (but not that many really, not when you consider all those who did not) — and now, Ruschman Gallery is closing — clearing out — bolting the doors.

That Ruschman Gallery lasted almost to a silver anniversary makes the reason for the closure seem all the more preposterous — mere economics — according to the David Hoppe interview with Mark Ruschman in this week's NUVO. Life is short, art is long, right? Oh well, maybe the math don't lie. In the same Hoppe article Ruschman does imply that in addition to the deep recession the changing numbers and habits of Indy's art collectors weighed in as an impulse to his final decision.

Maybe Ruschman will change his mind. Maybe this economy can turn on a dime. Whatever comes next — if Ruschman parks his Cadillac for good — the ride won't be the same.

Mark Diekhoff, June, 2009

see also:

On the Cusp : After 25 years, Ruschman Gallery Closing

Indy Star - Art Seen : Ruschman Gallery Closing After 25 Years

Indiana Economic Digest : Economy leads to Ruschman closing downtown Indianapolis art gallery

Hoosier Salon 85th Annual Exhibit ‘Designed to Last’ at the Indiana State Museum

Eager to Please with Some Pleasant Surprises - 85th Annual Hoosier Salon 

originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal July 18, 2009

Many Hands, Fred Doloresco, 2009 Best of Show, 85th Annual Hoosier Salon

Classics, Penny French-Deal’s small oil was the first picture to capture my attention. The painting is nostalgic in its entirety. Its brushwork is impressionist, as is favored by most painters in the exhibition. The subject is a small town street of yesteryear. Arched windows and quaint awnings compose the turn of the century facades. Depression-era automobiles line the curb in colors bright enough to cheer up our modern memories of that sepia-toned era — candy apple red and a shiny royal blue.

Garden Chores by Ronald Mack is also an amalgamation of entirely nostalgic elements. Some charming farm girls dressed as in the 19th Century — either inspired from sometime else, formed from the artist’s imagination or maybe staged as a fussy tableau that Mack painted from life. The young ladies stroll through a vegetable garden, between the split rails, in the foreground of a slope-roofed farmstead shack through the long shadows of a setting sun.

Kathleen McMurray’s Pears with Blue and White Vase is composed not only of the namesake fruit and ubiquitous Japanese blue and white vessel, but also a marvelously rendered pewter spoon. The oil painting salutes Dutch still life masterfully, but that is as far as it goes.

Two award winning paintings hanging near one another reveal the eye of the jurors at play. Bahama Breezes by Denise Pettee-Frazier and Lifting Skies by David Tutwiler both exhibit a loose, sensual gauze of brushwork and a subject matter that inspires happy fuzzy memories of sunny holidays.

Snowy Day on Washington Street by Chris Newlund showcases the artist’s engaging and deft handling of the brush. The painting’s subject is sweet and is seductive almost to the point of being cringe-worthy, like Auguste Renoir can be at times. The chair barely exists at the painting’s edges, as the artist skillfully propels the viewer’s attention to the drama of the scene — a pregnant clump of grapes about to splash the coffee cup.

An idiosyncratic vision is displayed in the folk art collage by Ed McEndarfer, Storm Over Paradise. Decoration for decoration’s sake really — one motif is a line of Indiana-looking trees interspersed with half hidden palms.

William Lawson’s Autumn Shallows captures a natural moment of expressionist color — the bright oranges, deep blues and paling greens of an Indiana lake side in October. Despite the active color scheme, Lawson achieves an almost Chardon-like calm and harmony with the painting. The painting’s realism is all the more apparent with the nearby hanging of Marianne Glick's Abstract I. Glick’s abstract shares the same expressionist's colors but presents them to provoke a jagged and jarring effect, quite the opposite intention of the serene scene painted by Lawson.

The big, rolling bend of Lynn Dunbar’s Mighty Ohio River is painted of similar expressionist colors, shared also by her other entry, Little Pink Houses, Alton. This artist seems to utilize the colors in a more premeditated manner, as both pictures use them the same. But maybe the artist caught both scenes at a similar moment of light.

Virtuoso performances are awarded with the palette knife oil by Beth Forst, Cornrows Below Zero, and the pastel industrial impression and gossamer handling seen in The Ethanol Plant by Carol Strock-Wasson.

Dan Woodson has a sense of humor, I imagine. His My Summer Home begins at first glance as a visual riddle. The scene is a seek and find of the picture’s subject amid the visually busy and interesting monochrome crosshatching woodland branches that act a Cy Twombly camouflage. Woodson’s summer place is a tree house, with requisite swinging tire hanging from a branch, all covered in winter snow.

C. J. Fang’s Expressive Tranquility, not surprisingly, expresses tranquility. I found the composition of the acrylic painting to be among the most beautiful in the exhibit. The shapes of the clumps of marsh grass — the sky indivisible with the crystal still water. The golden ripe and fresh green shoots.

I wanted to enjoy the fabric collage Chicago, N. Michigan Ave. by Joel Fremion more. However, the work affected me less due to the inclusion of the word Prudential on a skyscraper and the composition’s starting point, the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and the pre-fab drama of its stone lion.

By my count, there are thirteen pictures of the traditional ‘winding road’ genre all hung together on a section of wall. However, one work among them displays an unexpected turn. To state it simply, Alan Patrick’s Winding Road doesn’t. He’s painted a winding road stripped of all nostalgia and pre-packaged charm. It’s just a typical Indiana 3-way stop. A ‘T’ intersection. As if the blunting top of the ‘T’ wasn’t enough to frustrate a winding road, the stark left/right choice is further obscured by the heavy shade of the overhanging treeline.

Pamela Denny-Rohrbach’s Bittersweet, Vanitas I expresses joy. A joy in painting, a joy in the objects and color of life, a joy in living. She’s composed a still life that’s a roller coaster of movement similar to some of Cezanne’s lopsided cornucopias. Her approach contains no shortcut. All included is intricate and wild. The shrinking jagged oak leaves, an almost obscenely decorative fabric tumbling from the table in a myriad of folds, complicated oriental porcelain, an odd King Neptune fruit bowl.

The 2009 ‘Best of Show’ is Fred Doloresco’s Many Hands. Doloresco’s skills as a painter are marred a bit by the overwhelming nostalgia of his subject. Even the picture's framing seems to aspire to imitate an earlier age. The result, unfortunately, is somewhat gaudy and overly sentimental to my tastes — a mash of Milet’s L’Angelus and similar pictures with Monet's haystacks, all in a picture frame fit for a king. The picture’s scale is admirable. Indeed it shares the ambitious size seen in the works that make up the Society of Western Artists exhibit showing concurrently down the hall. The picture’s painterly effects can entertain, to be sure, if you stand nice and close. But at a distance, Doloresco’s harvest peasants have become too familiar to excite all that much.

See also:

Hoosier Art Salon website

Indiana State Museum Exhibits