Baltimore, MD ARTIST STATEMENTI have tried to imagine what might have grown out of the American art which flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century. No artists followed directly in the footsteps of George Bellows or Reginald Marsh. World War II intervened and the vivid representationalism of the Ashcan School was swept away by the rhetoric which preached the gospel of abstract expressionism.An art of real and present visual experience was nipped in the bud. Instead we have been served up a starveling diet of visual formalism. Is it too late to pick up our brushes and paint unencumbered by over-intellectualism? BIOGRAPHYAlicia Czechowski was born in Detroit Michigan. She has an MFA in Painting and was Professor of Art at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for five years. In 1989 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her illustrations appeared regularly in The New Yorker from 1989 to 1995. She had two solo shows in NYC at the late FAR Gallery and at Sindin Galleries, and has exhibited widely in the US, and in Germany and Japan. Her work is in private collections throughout the US, and in Mexico and Europe.