Some of the large oil canvases lying against a wall in the studio Andrew Conklin shares with his wife, Helen Oh, look as if they might have been done by a 17th-century Dutch baroque painter, a contemporary of Vermeer. Others, with their naturalistic poses and perspectives, their figures so precisely drawn they seem to have been caught on camera, resemble the work of Caravaggio. Only the modern haircuts and clothing mark them as the work of the 39-year-old Conklin. Oh’s small still lifes show how much she too admires the 17th-century Dutch painters, though her style is looser.
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Conklin remembers sketching thousands of athletes and animals when he was a boy living in Norwood Park on the city’s northwest side in the 1960s. His father, an editor for the Cooperative League of America, would bring home office stationery for him and his brother to draw on. After graduating from high school Conklin decided to study at the American Academy of Art in the Loop. “I took advertising courses there too,” he says, “thinking that I’d become a commercial illustrator.” But what he enjoyed most was figure painting and learning the psychological side of portraiture. “It’s always a complicated operation to control the mood,” he says, “to get to the essence and truth of a character while delivering an interpretation that a photographer wouldn’t be able to duplicate.” He spent hours in the Renaissance and impressionist galleries of the Art Institute copying works he thought revealed some emotional truth.
By the early 1980s the painter Conklin most wanted to emulate was Caravaggio. He’d been ambivalent about the Italian baroque iconoclast’s style when he first saw it. “Over-the-top,” he recalls. “I thought it was easy to manipulate light and color the way he did. I was more impressed with the Ninja Turtles of the Renaissance–Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo–the heroic artists who painted big.” But when he saw more of Caravaggio’s work in museums, particularly during a months-long sojourn in Italy, he began to appreciate more fully the painter’s ability to portray dramatic realism and everyday detail.
Soon after graduating, Conklin and Oh were married, and they began what Oh describes as a “giddy, bohemian existence.” A series of fellowships carried them through a few years, during which Conklin did commissions and painted three or four large-scale canvases. He says he gradually turned from social realism to recasting mythological subjects that “support my dualistic view of the world, of the inevitable gap between man and woman.” One painting, titled Oyster Bar, shows a couple drinking wine and eating oysters–“stoking the heat before sex,” he says–while another woman strums a guitar and a third bends down to get another bottle of wine. “It’s a reference to the mythological Paris too,” he says. “He’s the Trojan prince judging Aphrodite and two other goddesses.” Yet all four figures are contemporary. His latest work shows an artist’s model as illusory muse, in a pose, he says, that pays homage to Modigliani.
Late last year the Tree Studio residents were told they had to move, perhaps temporarily, during construction in the adjacent Medinah Temple, which will be converted into a shopping arcade anchored by a Bloomingdale’s furniture store. “We’ve been told that some of the artists will be allowed to have their studios back,” says Conklin, “although not as living quarters.” Oh has since rented a studio in the Fine Arts Building. Conklin is still looking for a studio in the South Loop. For the first time since they’ve been married, they won’t be working in the same space.
