Cleveland Museum of Art- Julian Stanczak’s “Filtered Yellow”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Cleveland, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Jul 242025
 

Filtered Yellow, 1968, by Ohio artist Julian Stanczak, is part of Cleveland Museum of Art‘s permanent collection.

From the museum about the artist and the work-

For more than a half century, Julian Stanczak maintained a distinguished career as an abstract painter interested in how vision works. Filtered Yellow features hundreds of alternating reddish and greenish razor-sharp vertical bands that create the illusion of a yellow shape, despite the absence of pure yellow paint. As typical of his work, it emphasizes a high level of technical mastery rivaled by few.

And from the artist’s website about his work-

“My primary interest is color – the energy of the different wavelengths of light and their juxtapositions. The primary drive of colors is to give birth to light. But light always changes; it is evasive. I use the energy of this flux because it offers me great plasticity of action on the canvas. To capture the metamorphoses – the continuous changing of form and circumstance – is the eternal challenge and, when achieved, it offers a sense of totality, order, and repose. Color is abstract, universal – yet personal and private in experience.”

“If I take time to really look at what I’m seeing, there is no limit to the secrets unveiled. I look to nature for clarification and crystallization, for things that I can use in my paintings. I live in the moment of recognition. In search for power through abstract clarity, I select shapes that have the maximum possibility for metamorphic action. We can only see what we understand!”

 

Ohio Art Shows- Barbara Stanczak at Akron Art Museum

 Akron, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Feb 152024
 

“The Flameless Green Dragon”, 2018, Elm and acrylic

“In Rhythm”, 2018, Elm and acrylic; and “Water Music”, 2002, Inkjet photocollage on paper

“Introvert”, 2019, Elm; “Engendering Life”, 2020, Green soapstone

Two left sculptures made of Italian translucent alabaster and “Harboring Emptiness”, 2021, Maple and acrylic

Above are several works from Barbara Stanczak Spirit and Matter, the artist’s recent exhibition at Akron Art Museum.  Stanczak’s sculptures are energetic shapes created in partnership with the natural materials used.

From the museum’s web page-

Barbara Stanczak’s sculptures are born from an essential combination: the artist’s creative vision and the natural qualities of her materials. This two-sided collaboration remains in effect throughout Stanczak’s entire process of conceiving and creating an artwork. A piece of wood or stone presents initial possibilities that help to set a direction, but invariably the course will change—the substance may be so hard as to resist carving, or it may contain internal structures that must be accommodated. But the artist does not surrender her own interests, as she has found that a successful work must become the physical embodiment of a rich and valuable idea. In her own words, “I can only hold onto my idea of the whole by letting go of ‘mine’ and focusing on ‘our.’ The material becomes a partner who needs my patience, respect, thoughtfulness, cooperation, skill, and persistence.”

Stanczak committed to working with wood and stone only after a long process of discovery. Born in Germany in 1941, she moved to the United States in 1960 to assist her grandfather in painting church frescoes, and later worked in handmade paper, metal, and a variety of other media. She also worked alongside her husband, Julian Stanczak, whose paintings and prints were celebrated at the Akron Art Museum with a one-artist show in 2013. As her own career evolved throughout her thirty-seven-year tenure as a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Barbara carved her first wooden sculpture in 1992. “I was tired of searching,” she recalls. “It was time to arrive!”

Stanczak continues to find wood and stone compelling because, as she puts it, they are constantly “teasing, tempting, and provoking me to see more, to see beyond, to see the micro and the macro of the universe.” She finds these universal qualities not in immediately recognizable forms like leaves and flowers, but rather in dense rings and layers, subtle features formed over decades or even thousands of years. As Stanczak exercises her own intuition, she aligns it with these natural processes. As the artist and the materials harmonize, it is as if two forms of intelligence are working together—as if spirit and matter are not so separate as one might expect.