Robert Kameczura, Renaissance Man

09 May Robert Kameczura, Renaissance Man

Robert Kameczura, a Northwest Side artist, has been called “one of Chicago’s Renaissance men” for his painting, printmaking, and photography, as well as for his poetry and his love of dance, music, and film.

Robert has a long history as a visual artist. He has exhibited widely and internationally in Japan, Poland, Ireland, and Canada as well as across the U.S.

His portfolio might almost be the work of several artists working with different subjects, in different styles, and in different mediums, with mastery of all. He works in almost all genres—acrylic paintings (often of epic size), watercolors, silkscreen prints, drawings, linocuts, and original digital art.

Robert Kameczura’s Work

Robert’s paintings often have many characters and are on an epic scale. They feature imagined societies that contain elements of reality and fantasy. His print works, which mix painting, drawing, and photography, frequently have a symbolist cast. He has been much praised for his technical skill as a draftsman and as a colorist and noted for the refined handling of his brush.

He has had over a dozen one-man shows entirely as a black and white photographer. For the last few years, he has done a great many digital giclee prints. Some of these prints are art-based, done after his drawings in the manner of traditional prints, but a great many are based on his photographs. These are altered, hand-retouched, colored, reworked extensively on the computer and then printed with archival inks on fine paper in limited editions. June Spiezer, whose huge art collection is housed in the Rockford Art Museum has said of him, “Robert Kameczura is Chicago’s new ‘Genius of the Giclee.’ He treats this new medium with the finesse and skill of an old master.”

Surprisingly, considering Robert’s levels of technical skills, he is self-taught as a visual artist. He has a degree in literature and poetry from Columbia College. He is a published poet and several of his poems have been set to music by classical composers, most notably Dan Tucker and Claudia Howard Queen. For several years he was a designer for modern dance companies, including the Chicago Repertory Dance Ensemble and The National Ballet of Ireland.

Robert is the founder of the Mythopian Artists Group, a group of seven highly respected Midwestern artists with an interest in narrative painting in a contemporary context. He also one of the curators of the “Chicago Artists Interpret Shakespeare” show featured on the Emmy-nominated “Our City, Our Shakespeare” show on WTTW.

Highly active as an artist-organizer, he headed the campaign which created Chicago’s Public Art Program. He is one of the creators and founders and co-chair for the first two years of Chicago Artists Month and was one of the founders of The Chicago Artists Coalition, to name only a few of his credits.

A highly scholarly person, Robert is art and classical music critic for Big Shoulders Magazine and is also known for his thoughtful lectures on art history and on the history of Chicago art. His website is at www.kameczura.com.