Becoming Free

05/01/2025

This Friday, 6-8pm, we are holding a closing reception for Artist Jane Michalski and her beautiful one person show in the sanctuary of First Free Church Andersonville 5255 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL. This is a last chance to see the show. We hope you can come out and support Jane as she talks about this new, powerful work
Friday, May 2, 6-8pm, 5255 N Ashland. Corner of Berwyn and Ashland. Enter on the Berwyn side. Text 312.664.3406 for more info.

09/18/2021

11/19/2019

Hey First Free folks! Stu and Dan will be installing new paintings at First Free this coming Monday the 24th, 11am. Stay as long as you want. We'd love your help. Message Dan Addington on Facebook, or 312 664 3406.

08/13/2019

Melynda Van Zee: Freedom from the Core -
August 2019 - October, 2019 -

Melynda Van Zee shares her artwork at exhibitions and art fairs throughout the United States. Her works are in the collections of numerous private and corporate collectors around the country. She is the author of an art technique book published by Lark Books and enjoys public speaking and teaching. Melynda earned her BA in Elementary Education and Art from Dordt College. Her studio is located in the heart of the prairies of central Iowa.

Says Melynda about her work: “I work with a process of pouring thick acrylic paints and washes of transparent acrylic color on canvas. I often use spiral imagery in my paintings to express my process of deep inner work, which has helped me to find the equilibrium and energy to pursue a creative life. The spiral is deeply symbolic of growth, change and transformation. The spiral is also one of the most commonly found design forms in nature.”

“My painting process is a method of looking deeply within to discover and express my inner spirit. I like to ask myself questions like "How do I create a life of abundant freedom?" In essence my paintings are prayers, longings, expressions for which verbal language falls short. My hope is that the colors, textures, and movement of this work will nurture your soul and creative spirit.”

07/18/2019

About the Paintings: My work is concerned with observation and representation as contemplative activities, and with mark-making as a means of creating a rich, complex surface that embodies human touch. I want my paintings to function as both images and objects, and my surfaces are worked so as to be both tactile and illusionistic: describing space while drawing the gaze to the painted surface. To this end, I often work in egg tempera, which encourages a process of repetitive mark-making to build up a dense surface of short strokes that define surface while recording the hand's movements over time. These surfaces tend to embody a certain intimacy intended to be encountered at close range, so that the viewer is encouraged to focus on the parts and to search for relationships among them.

The subjects I depict reflect this concern with the physical as the locus of spiritual inquiry. Ordinary objects – a carpenter's plumb line, corrugated cardboard, or a broken glass – are frequently placed in relationship to more extraordinary imagery culled from art history and current events. Probe, for example, reproduces a detail from Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas as if it were taped onto a piece of cardboard that bears a news photo of the burning of the Deepwater Horizon in 2010. This image of Thomas placing his fingers into the
wound in Christ's side appears repeatedly in my work, along with the results of everyday mishaps and environmental catastrophes. These are images of wounds, of doubt and belief, and of weakness. Fragility appears in these paintings as a fundamental aspect of human experience. The plumb line also appears repeatedly in my paintings. A simple tool used by carpenters and construction workers to determine if walls and columns are perfectly vertical, the plumb line can also be seen as an exacting standard against which we judge our work. Is it plumb? Is it true? Will it hold up?

Steven Carrelli was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1967. He received a BA in Studio Art from Wheaton College in 1990 and an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University in 1995. As a 1995-96 Fulbright scholar, he studied egg tempera painting in Florence, Italy. Carrelli has returned to Italy on many occasions to teach and to work. He lives in Chicago with his wife, the painter Louise LeBourgeois, and he teaches at DePaul University.

Carrelli's paintings and drawings have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, and they have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Chicago Sun-Times, The Chicago Reader, New American Paintings and Time Out Chicago. His work is represented by Addington Gallery in Chicago.

07/18/2019

Exhibition: Spring 2019. Jeff McNutt was born in Iowa in 1967 and began his artistic pursuits in 1989 while working for The Walt Disney Company. In 1991 he moved to Los Angeles and continued his art education in animation houses across Hollywood, with street artists in LA, and also at Cal Arts in Valencia, CA. In 1993, Jeff moved back to Iowa to study graduate painting at The University of Iowa where he started to merge the ideas of animation, street art, and the beauty of nature.

"The content of my work is inspired by a desire to communicate a sense of life and presence. I want my artwork to evoke ideas about creation through an engaged use of color, energy and movement.

I begin by observing landscape from all over the Midwest. I am visually inspired by the streets of Chicago, the lush green hills of Wisconsin, and Iowa’s rich landscape where Grant Wood once painted and called home. It is rich in color, spiritual and natural.

I apply and remove oil paint, oil stick, and spray paint until the painting begins to develop a history like distressed art on old brick buildings. Many of the marks on the canvas are inspired by animation sketches, adding a sense of movement and life in the work.

I believe in the spiritual nature of the creative act, and I invite the Holy Spirit into my time in the studio. I want the work to evoke a feeling of beauty, soul, and energy, and to affect a space with a sense of God’s love.”

11/28/2018

As we celebrate Advent this Sunday at First Free Chicago, we welcome new artwork by artist Jeff McNutt. This painting is "Poetry of a New Friend", 48x48, oil on canvas.

04/10/2018

ONCE known primarily as a sculptor based in the California Bay Area, Helen Dannelly began a new, groundbreaking series of paintings on paper after moving to Chicago in 2015. Expansive, vibrant, and complex, these abstract paintings are created using the unusual and immediate medium of translucent alcohol-based inks on Yupo, a synthetic watercolor paper. Her recent work marries a dynamic expression through gesture and color with a sense of scientific observation. These paintings seem to reference not only the underwater and ocean themes for which they are titled, but also the profound power and exuberant energy of life in all its diverse forms.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Helen Dannelly studied painting at San Francisco State University in the early nineties with Bay Area Photorealists Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean, as well as with Cherie Raciti and Teresa Stanley. She studied sculpture, including metal arts and bronze casting at the University of Minnesota, and at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2009, she began working in encaustic which she enjoys because of its versatility. An award-winning sculptor, Dannelly’s work has been featured in exhibitions both locally and nationally. She is represented in private and public collections throughout the country.

IMAGES below are from the First Free Sanctuary Series Spring exhibition: "Spring Waters", a SOLO exhibition by Helen Dannelly. April 1 through June 30, 2018 at First Free, Chicago.

04/10/2018

04/10/2018

Beginning in the 2017 Advent Season, and running through the month of March, the sanctuary walls of First Free Chicago will feature the mixed media artwork of Crystal Neubauer. We encourage viewers to take some time with each of the works, allowing these offerings to contribute to your time of meditation in the sanctuary.

Crystal Neubauer is a Mixed Media Artist drawn to the broken, cast out, and overlooked items of the past. She sees beauty in the mundane, brings new life to forgotten objects, and finds the process of salvaging old materials and creating new art to be therapeutic and healing. As her work evolves, a more complete understanding of her work and why she chooses to use materials that others see as trash comes to light:

"It's about seeing something beautiful in the discarded

About giving new life to what has been broken and cast out

It's about seeing worth in what has been deemed worthless

And value in the valueless

Ultimately it's about humanity

And redemption"

- Crystal Marie Neubauer

01/19/2018

First Free Fall '17 exhibition Boats and Bridges, a SOLO exhibition by Marissa Voytenko that raises awareness of the current world-wide refugee crisis. Sept 1- Through November 10, 2017.

About Marissa Voytenko:

Originally from a small agricultural community in Northern California, Marissa has traveled widely and lived for several years in western Ukraine. Always drawing as a child, she continues to create with joy and commitment. After earning a graduate degree in Fine Art and Teaching, she discovered the medium of encaustic. Its molten quality and mysterious effects were a good fit for what she hungered for in her work because it not only pushed against her desire for precision, it also opened up pathways for creative inquiry. Marissa uses her grid-like thought process and the liquid quality of the beeswax to create images with psychological meaning and depth. Marissa resides in Chicagoland with her young family and is an adjunct professor of Art at Wheaton College.