Paintings by Springfield’s Mary Ellen
Strack and photographs by Carlinville’s Karl Warma are
featured, along with works by other area artists, at Prairie Art
Alliance’s current show 6×6, timed to coincide with the city’s annual
Route 66 Festival. “We wanted to take advantage of
being in our downtown location and tie in with the festival,”
says Patrick Shavloske, PAA executive director. Member artists were
invited to submit works measuring 6 by 6 inches, related to travel,
or priced “in sixes,” Shavloske says. (Featured artists
Struck and Warma were not asked to conform to the theme —
though many of Warma’s photos were taken at the roadside.) The 51-year-old Warma, born in
O’Fallon, Ill., and now a resident of Carlinville, has
traveled an interesting path that’s taken him to Africa,
Rhode Island, and San Diego. “I did not do any art until I went away
to school at Western [Illinois University]. My first summer there,
I had a great art professor, Preston Jackson. I got involved with
marketing, photography, watercolor, small-press operation, and book
production.”
After graduation, he served three tours in
the Peace Corps, helping launch a book production facility in
Gambia and training the locals in photography, offset printing, and
illustration. “It was a great experience for a kid from
Illinois who had never traveled much to be a part of that
culture,” he says. Stateside again, Warma studied graphic illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and
fought a losing battle with what he calls his “photo side.”
He explains: “Drawing required effort, and I always felt it was a
legitimate course of study. Photography seemed too easy for me, and I
didn’t consider it seriously as an art form because it seemed so
natural. Eventually I gave in to the tug in that direction.” For
13 years, while based in San Diego, Warma worked with advertising
agencies and established his own firm, Ad Image Communications, which
he continues to operate in Carlinville. Warma’s return to his home state was
pure serendipity. “I was visiting Illinois and passing
through Carlinville when I saw a house I wanted to live in. I
bought it and rented it to others while I was tying up loose ends
out West.” Warma, who moved to Carlinville in 1996, set up
the art computer lab and served on the faculty of Blackburn College
before devoting all of his time to his business. Most of his photographic art depicts outdoor
subjects, places, and spaces, mostly with no sign of human
habitation, rural but not rustic. Often the images echo the bygone
era when Route 66 was the “Mother Road.”
The 6×6 exhibition
runs through Oct. 29 at the H.D. Smith Gallery, in the Hoogland
Center for the Arts, 420 S. Sixth St.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2005.
