Watercolor painting demo with Tom Torluemke at the Chicago Cultural Center

You’ll find the exhibit Tom Torluemke: LIVE! ON PAPER 1987 -2024 on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center. The fact that this is a free exhibition seems appropriate enough, as Torluemke is an artist who is extremely generous with his time.  I’ve never seen an artist who seemed to enjoy being around his patrons so much—scheduling multiple days to be on hand in the gallery to talk with them. On Saturday July 19, Torluemke will hold a watercolor painting demo in the exhibition space. One viewer will receive the painting as a gift through a drawing at the end of the session.

Tormuelke, a resident of Dyer, Indiana—where he lives with his wife Linda—seems generous in terms of his subject matter as well, as if he were trying to encompass the entire human experience in his art.

The exhibition curator Dan Cameron says as much in his autobiographical blurb for the accompanying exhibition book:  It represents, he writes “almost forty years of studio activity that includes works about nature, fantasy, autobiography, abstraction, social strife, identity, and a full spectrum of emotion from shame to ecstasy, showcasing Torluemke’s unique artistry through his freewheeling imagination and boundless technical chops in capturing our broad collective experience of being fully aware, conscious citizens living in this place at this peculiar moment in history.”

The thing that struck me immediately about his inlaid paper collage “Dresses to Kill,” when I visited the exhibit on May 30, aside from the innovative collage technique, was the way the depicted subjects reflected the background where there were clearly some explosions going on. There seemed to be an intimate connection between foreground and background.

The origin of the work goes back to his teaching days at Valparaiso University in the early 2000s, he told me.  One spring day he invited some students to come and pose for him.

“While I was drawing them, I did contour line drawings,  life size, exactly, and then they were all like… dressed to kill because they were going out, they were going on spring break. They wanted to maybe meet a mate. They wanted to party and have fun. So they were all like, in their Spring Break best, you know what I mean.

At the same time, the Second Gulf War was going on.  

So then, what I realized, these kids were getting dressed to kill,” he told me.  “And I'm thinking, Oh, my God, these kids are the exact age to go to war, and if they were to go to war, they'd be dressed to kill, really dressed to kill.”

That is, kids the same age who weren’t in college were overseas fighting the war.

“Some kids that are in school, they're not going to end up in war, but kids that aren't in school, they don't have opportunities and get in the military because they want to make some money or whatever. So I used those as two polar opposites.”