The Life and Times of Lake Shore Drive
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Woolf has had no formal training except for a few life drawing classes–taken before he met his wife, he says, mostly so he could look at naked women. Born in 1927 to one of the founding families of Greeley, Colorado, he had a grandmother who painted so obsessively that she reportedly tied his dad and aunt into their high chairs so she could work. She wanted everyone in the family to paint, but Woolf was the only one who tried, and he preferred school and sports to art. “I loved my grandmother,” he says. “She was not really creative, though–she copied other painters’ work.” In college he majored in mechanical engineering and soon after graduation moved to Chicago, where he worked at an uncle’s industrial painting company, later managing it (he retired in 1999). His wife, Francesca, was a commercial artist when they met in 1952, and both became Sunday painters.
When Woolf was growing up, his friends would apparently sometimes forget that he was one of Greeley’s few Jews and make anti-Semitic remarks. Today, he says, prejudice is more hidden, which he signifies by incorporating swastikas, formed by the intersection of the drive with cross streets, at the edges of the Lake Shore Drive paintings.
When: Through Sat 10/15
