Marilynn Weitzman, Painted With Photographs, 59

[DGH]

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Marilynn Weitzman, of Deerfield, Illinois, died of pancreatic cancer
on Monday, April 5, 2004, in her home, at the age of 59.

Artist Marilynn Weitzman painted with photographs. Her camera was her
sketchbook and the images it captured became canvases for her
creativity.

Mrs. Weitzman took hundreds of photographs, creating dozens of art
pieces with them.

"Photography was her passion," said her daughter, Eliza Buckner, but
the art she created was more than just pictures.

Mrs. Weitzman often developed her photographs onto watercolor paper
and drew or painted on them. She sometimes cut them up and pasted them
back together or onto other pictures.

She used old photo developing methods that created rich browns and
deep blues in her pictures, allowing her to manipulate shades and
textures.

By mixing, matching, borrowing and marrying different styles, material
and forms, Mrs. Weitzman created art that was uniquely her own.

"No one worked like Marilyn. She truly developed her own artwork, her
niche in the art world," said fellow artist Harriet Hanson Klein.

Mrs. Weitzman held dozens of shows at galleries throughout the city
and the suburbs and in Wisconsin and Indiana.

She also did pieces for the 2001 Suite Home Chicago citywide art
project and a bench on Navy Pier for the Chicago [Illinois] Children's
Museum.

She grew up in the Chicago area and briefly lived in Wisconsin and New
York before her family moved to Skokie, where she graduated from Niles
East High School.

She married in 1965 and had two children. The couple lived in Hyde
Park for several years before moving to Deerfield.

Mrs. Weitzman was a doting stay-at-home mother. "She was the kind of
mother that all of my friends wished they had and when they were in
her company, she was their mother," said her daughter.

"She would watch MTV with us so she could maintain her cool status,"
her daughter added.

Mrs. Weitzman received a bachelor of fine arts in 1984 from Barat
College in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she was exposed to a variety
of art forms and fell in love with photography.

After graduating, Mrs. Weitzman joined the A.R.C. Gallery, a women's
cooperative where female artists could produce and show their art. She
served as a board member for seven years.

From 1989 until 1999, Mrs. Weitzman and Klein pioneered the movement
of artists to the Near West Side with The Studiospace, one of the
first art work spaces and galleries in the area.

Her last project may have been her most treasured. An avid collector
of children's alphabet books, "she was infatuated with the alphabet,"
said her daughter.

Several months before her death, her husband, Robert, helped her
self-publish her own children's alphabet book, "A Book of Careers ...
What Children Can Dream," using photographs she took of children
dressed in the clothing of different professions.