Fox Lake Farm Yard (plus an original block)

Gustave Baumann

Gustave Baumann's seventh color woodcut was done while he was in Chicago. For this woodcut he employed the Japanese printing method, using water-based ink on Japanese paper. He soon changed to using oil-based and/or varnish-based inks he mixed himself.

Quoted from "In a Modern Rendering" by Gala Chamberlain, number 7, pages 132-133:

"Fox Lake, Illinois, is a recreational area near Chicago. Artists who were members of the Palette and Chisel Club (Chicago) had an encampment there and spent their time painting and partying in an attempt to forget the dismal routine of commercial work."

Baumann wrote:"I found time to see what other studios produced: there were Eugene Savage, L.O. Griffith, Ezra Winters, Leroy Baldridge, Victor Higgins, Walter Ufer, Frank King and Rudolph Ruzicka, all of them like myself doing what was at hand plus a fling at painting.

Over the weekends we all crowded into an accommodation train that took us to our favorite sketching ground around a near-by lake. A leaky sailboat, the Doughnut, waited to be bailed out by us and then skimmed over the lake only to sink again after leaving on Monday morning. Occasionally there was a lot of horseplay such as slipping a shiny carp between somebody's blankets, but the keynote seemed to be work, to put the paint on the canvas rather than letting it dry in the tubes. What this habit eventually prepared for us for and how we met the problem time will tell....

Baumann and Chamberlain 2009, pp. 313-14.