Lake Erie Lives

Something about the images tugs at the mind. There’s a familiarity embedded in the shapes, the scale. In the hands of Buffalo artist Eileen Graetz, industrial ruins morph into objects of desire. Abandoned buildings and rusty wharfs become color-saturated paintings of a parallel universe.

“Living in this city my whole life, the industrial buildings, the grain elevators, they’re a part of my history, ” says Graetz. “There’s something beautiful, even in the deterioration of them. There’s something about that aspect of it that sort of speaks to my soul.”

Would Graetz be the artist she is today if she’d finished art school in her youth? If life hadn’t intervened, an unexpected sickness and the need for a job pulling her away from art and popping her into the metal-and-plastic world of a car factory?

As a young student at Buffalo State College, Graetz wound up bedridden for two months with mono. When she finally emerged healthy, she found the school wouldn’t take her back. She worked for a few years, taking art classes at night, and returned to school at the age of 28, this time receiving her BFA from SUNY Buffalo.

“I graduated. My mother said, ‘What are you going to do now? … I heard Chevy’s hiring — go get a job,’ ” Graetz remembers. “My art career went on hold.”

It was typical of the times: live in the Midwest, work in an automobile factory. Over the next 30 years, while continuing to take painting classes at night and working with the maintenance and machine repair department during the day, Graetz watched her industry slowly decline. The plant she worked at closed in 2006, the jobs shipped out of the country. By then, Graetz was retired, finally able to focus on art full time. But it was that setting that created the artist Graetz is today.

She notes Georgia O’Keefe as an influence, and it’s clear why. While O’Keefe turned to massive, silent swaths of the desert, Graetz pointed her eye and — after arthritis shifted her focus from painting to photography — her camera lens on the hulking, crumbling landscape under her own nose: the abandoned ghosts of Buffalo’s past. “If she can reduce mountains to just big blobs of color, I can do the same thing with buildings and machinery,” Graetz says.

Shape, color, reduction. Her works prove that anything has the potential for beauty. It just takes the right eye to find it. “When I see something, like even in an old building, I’ll see either the texture of the rust or the colors,” says Graetz. “The light in Buffalo is different than in a landlocked city. It bounces off the water, and it creates shadows and light on the buildings and on the landscape. There’s a unique reflective quality, and I guess that’s kind of what I’m drawn to.”

Graetz finds inspiration on the Miss Buffalo, a sightseeing boat that cruises the Buffalo River’s historic areas, seeing the old buildings from their backsides, their water sides. She also drives down to Chicago Street and wanders the cobblestone streets, camera in hand.

Often she sees the end result when she looks through the lens. She plays with her photos on her computer, pulling the tiniest details out of a large image and turning them into the focal point. Her pieces are a game of identification and comparison — she photographs a rusting boat, zeroes in on a swatch of the hull, explodes the colors and celebrates the wear and tear, the aging metal.

“They have a wistful quality to them,” she says of her photo subjects. “Eventually, unfortunately, a lot of these are going to be torn down. So it’s kind of like my tribute to them.”

Graetz’s work will be on display at Art Dialogue Gallery June 4 through July 9. One Linwood Ave., Buffalo, NY, 716-885-2251, artdialoguegallery.com.