Art of Joey Szymanski

The Art of Joey Szymanski, an exhibition featuring the art of painter Joey Szymanski currently in the Elmhurst Artists’ Guild Gallery in the Elmhurst Art Museum. Joey’s unique paintings on plywood will fascinate everyone from carpenters to collectors. Where the ordinary viewer sees a piece of construction grade or finish grade plywood, Joey sees a pastoral landscape or gentle seascape. Joey artfully sands the wood and applies paints and stains to elicit the exquisitely beautiful scenery that is naturally present within the grain and blemishes of the plywood surface. It is a startling experience to study these paintings and realize that the art is not "on" the plywood, but rather "of" the plywood, and that Joey’s painterly efforts have merely allowed the rest of us to see that which was there all along.