Silvery mist floats above calm waters, muting the yellow glow of the coming dawn. You can hear the lake lapping iat the shore as you watch the silent shifting of a ghostly mist.
You look, you listen and you wonder: How did all that get inside a box about 4 feet high, 5 feet wide and just a few inches deep?
It got there because Steve Waldeck of rural Spring Grove put it there.
“I’ve kind of taken experimentation into a new conceptual realm of artmaking,” says Waldeck, a lanky 53-year-old instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who combines art and technology to produce images perhaps unlike any other artist’s.
When describing Waldeck’s art, the word “moving” applies both figuratively and literally. He uses light, sound and movement to bring his art to life in ways that create emotional responses to idealized images of moments in time.
“His work is peaceful, almost spiritual,” says longtime Waldeck friend and art patron Meredith Anderson-Dam of Fox Lake. “Light is often symbolic of spirituality, and he uses light in ways that bring out a strong, peaceful response in people. That feeling of peacefulness and serenity is what makes his work almost spiritual.”
Fellow School of the Art Institute instructor Greg Mowery describes Waldeck’s art as “simultaneously cutting edge and traditional. It’s almost eerie. There is no human presence in it, yet his work is informed by everything we know. His work implies a human presence. He uses devices that bring us into these spaces, not only the physical spaces but also the psychological spaces.”
His kinetic art melds the artistic with the mechanical.
“I have left the modern notion of how we make paintings,” Waldeck says. “These things I make have to do with developing a sense of real spaces that you kind of get through memory. They’re not comparable to looking out the window but are composed of visual triggers that link everyone’s past experiences, and in some ways I’m using the light as a medium of emotion. The light also enables me to penetrate the space. It actually goes back a small amount of physical space, although the apparent space is considerably more.”
“Winter Solstice” will give you the idea. The work stands about 7 feet high. The scene looks down a corridor and into a bedroom and through its back window. In the foreground is an empty wooden chair. Outside the window is a bare tree limb. Beyond that, as if looking across the street, is a two-story white house.
A light comes through the window, throwing the limb’s long shadow onto the floor. Every few seconds the limb and shadow move, as if the limb is waving in a winter breeze.
Waldeck uses traditional painting techniques to create images that are simple, essential, elemental. In “Winter Solstice,” his “visual triggers” are the empty chair, bare tree limb, white-sided house and hardwood floor, simple elements that we’ve all seen and stored in memory.
Behind the painted images, hidden inside the frames, he builds special lighting, small motors that move certain components, and devices to create sounds. If he turns on his artworks, his home studio, which he shares with his artist wife, Jane, is filled with the sounds of burbling fountains, singing birds, rolling thunder, all of it emanating from the various pieces standing on the cluttered floor or hanging from the walls.
Although Waldeck’s art may be unique, he stresses that the technology he uses is run-of-the-mill.
“I do a great deal of engineering to make these things really approachable inside,” he says. “These are, in a sense, the kitchen light, they’re so simple. I use fluorescent lights and tiny motors, with very reliable electronics.”
This is on purpose, so that if an internal part fails, it will be easy to fix. “I’m trying to work with archival notions, which is not something that often happens with kinetic art,” Waldeck says. “If something fails, a person could get a new part by going to Ace Hardware.”
Waldeck, of course, is accomplished in traditional artistic disciplines, because it was his innate abilities and formal training that got him into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a number of art awards early in his career when, as he says, “I was building a resume toward receiving tenure. But it’s been so long (since I have entered formal art competitions), I’d have to go back through my resume to remember what awards I’ve won.”
He no longer enters competitions, because he received tenure long ago. He also has settled on a style of art that does not fit usual categories of judging.
“It’s neither painting nor sculpture nor anything else traditional,” he says. “This issue of critical and public acceptance is a puzzle. The award I get is usually a purchase award” from a private or corporate art collector.
Corporate clients and private art collectors are the usual buyers of Waldeck’s works. He seldom exhibits them in galleries or art shows, although local organizations that ask him to exhibit usually can rely on him to do so. Last fall, for instance, Waldeck displayed some of his works in New Perspectives, a monthlong art exhibit sponsored by the Barrington Area Arts Council.
The council’s executive director, Sarah Bowers, says she and the staff found his works to be almost “therapeutic.”
“You feel that you can walk into a piece, as if you can become a part of it,” she says. She describes one piece, which depicts a wood deck with two empty Adirondack chairs on it that overlook a mist-covered lake.
“If I looked at it long enough, I felt totally refreshed, as if I had sat down in one of those chairs and taken a pleasant break,” Bowers says. “It was healing.”
Bowers was speaking figuratively. Someone who believes Waldeck’s art may be healing in the literal sense is Carol Tomer, fine arts archivist for the Cleveland Clinic, a major health-care facility in Cleveland. The clinic has two of Waldeck’s works and recently commissioned a third.
Tomer says that one of Waldeck’s pieces, a view of the ocean as seen from inside a beachfront residence, has been placed just outside the clinic’s chapel. The piece re-creates the sight and sound of waves washing ashore, including water and sky changing color over time and curtains moving as if blown by a sea breeze.
“Our patients stop in their tracks to look at it,” Tomer says. “It’s very calming and restorative. It’s an ordinary scene, but there’s something about it that fills a person with a feeling of well-being. Our patients have a very strong response to it.
“The second one is in our pediatric waiting area. It’s a friendly jungle scene, with animals that pop out and other little things going on. The kids love it. It may sound trite or hokey, but it’s not. It’s a wonderful piece of art.”
Waldeck typically spends about two months working on each piece. Some pieces have taken several times as long, depending on the art, the mechanics and Waldeck’s muse. And as for price, well, Waldeck steers away from that discussion altogether. Thousands, lots of them, is a safe guess.
Waldeck’s teaching assignments vary by semester, but one of his mainstay classes is “Light and Illusion,” which examines how light may be used to create various effects in a work of art. Other classes include “Fundamentals of Art and Technology” and “Fabrication for Kinetic Art.”
Barrington Area Arts Council curator Barbara Fuhr says Waldeck’s works are remarkable for how “one can go right into his constructions, or paintings–it’s hard to describe them. They are wonderful works of art, even without the sounds or motions he gives them. I’ve seen other kinetic art, but I don’t know of anything that comes even close to his.”
Waldeck’s works strip scenes to their essence, which may be why a person who sees one is able to mentally and emotionally place himself in the scene.
“Unlike most painting in which we would try to flatten the canvas to be true to materials–this is canvas and this is paint–I’m going to an early notion in which the picturemaking, the painting, is an illusion of reality,” Waldeck says. “The original notion of painting on a wall was a kind of hope that the viewer could see it as if looking out a window. This is a hole in the wall, and you’re looking into a new reality.
“What I’m really doing is compelling you to measure your heartbeat, and therefore your existence, with the existence of the space. I always assumed a viewer would appreciate the process by which the art is made. But I’ve learned over the years that people don’t want to know the reality. They don’t even want to hear me talk about how I do it. They just want to be there, to enjoy this possibility. It’s a kind of magic, and viewers don’t want to penetrate the magic.”
`SEEING THE LIGHT’ RUNS IN THE FAMILY
Steve Waldeck is not the only member of his family to be breaking new artistic ground. His wife, Jane, is an artist in her own right.
Her work is more abstract and “aggressive”– that’s the word she and her husband use–in the use of light. Whereas Steve puts light inside his artwork, Jane puts it on hers.
To her canvases, she adds neon and incandescent lights, along with other odds and ends, to combine elements of sculpture with painting.
“I guess my paintings are somewhat sculptural, yet they’re still obviously paintings,” Jane says. “I see the lights as an extension of the color palette. Paintings are an illusion anyway. If you can be fooled into believing a painting on a flat surface is three-dimensional, why not use three-dimensional objects to continue that train of thought?”
Her husband says of her work:: “She’s interested in dealing with traditional concepts of artmaking and extending them in ways that aren’t very traditional.”
ART SETS COFFEEHOUSE SCENE
It’s not often that the artwork of Steve and Jane Waldeck is simultaneously displayed to the public, but through June 20, anyone who stops in at the new Moka Lisa coffeehouse in Fox Lake can see both their works together.
Meredith Anderson-Dam, who opened the coffeehouse April 18, has made art the coffeehouse’s focus. The coffeehouse’s name, of course, plays off one of the world’s most famous works of art, the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Anderson-Dam says she plans to have art displays, poetry readings, jazz and folk music and other artistic ventures going on regularly at the coffeehouse. For her inaugural exhibit, she is featuring a collection of Jane Waldeck’s paintings.
And hanging permanently on one wall is “The Moka Lisa,” a piece of kinetic art commissioned from Steve Waldeck.
“The Moka Lisa” shows a Mona Lisa figure–a rarity for Waldeck, since he almost never puts people in his works–seated at a long table reminiscent of the one in Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The setting is an Italian courtyard. Waldeck brings the work to life by creating sight and sound illusions of steam whooshing from a mocha maker near the figure.
“I feel very privileged to be able to display Steve and Jane’s works together,” Anderson-Dam says. “Very few of Steve’s works are in the public realm because they’re snapped up by private collectors. I’m always in awe of what he comes up with. And Jane’s sculptural paintings demonstrate such a rich palette of colors and dramatic use of light. I think she’s brilliant. I’m so glad her artwork is setting the tone for the Moka Lisa.”
The Moka Lisa is at the corner of Grand Avenue and Nippersink Boulevard, across from the Fox Lake train station. Hours are 6 a.m.-6:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 6 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m.-noon Saturday. Call 847-973-0550.
