Evanston Art Center showcases stunning urban and natural landscapes by local artists

The current exhibit in the first-floor Wieghardt Gallery at the Evanston Art Center is the work of three talented Evanston artists, depicting both urban and natural landscape scenes.

Painters Mark Cleveland, Sarah Kaiser-Amaral and Joe Taylor make a great trio. Their work is so compatible that they have shown together before, at the gallery Space 900 on Dempster Street in 2021 and at Chicago’s famous Palette and Chisel last year.

Both Cleveland, markclevelandart.com, and Kaiser-Amaral, sarah-kaiser.com, were featured in Evanston Made’s Plein Air Festival last summer. In fact, Cleveland was the founding director of the first festival in 2022 and is co-chair of Plein Air Painters Chicago.

Kaiser-Amaral teaches at the Evanston Art Center. Taylor teaches in Chicago, at the Old Town Triangle and the Chicago Community Colleges. In addition to his painting, Taylor is a printmaker, illustrator and mosaic artist.

Much of the work in this exhibit is plein air painting – painting done outdoors, directly from the subject. Once experienced in the genre, a competent artist can work from notes, sketches and his own photographs in the studio to give a similar result. That may be the case here, but almost all the work looks as if it were done on site.

In this exhibit, Cleveland shows many Evanston scenes, one or two reminiscent of the storied Walter Burt Adams. And, like Adams, Cleveland is often seen about town with his French easel, totally absorbed in his painting, accompanied by jazz via his wireless earphones.

Kaiser-Amaral has two groups of works here, warm, colorful paintings of local scenes and from her travels – to Portugal, Spain, Sicily and Mexico. Adjacent, another group hangs, a group of quieter water paintings, with lots of cool blues.

She shows two “studies” with a finished oil from one of the studies, of our Dempster Street underpass – an opportunity for observant comparison. The artist, who helped hang the show, also has a “bin” that holds a gathering of small, matted works.