Not all artwork has – or has to have – significant depth.
Sometimes it flows from simplicity.
For Chicago artist Everett Reynolds, his painting on the wall of a Racine Avenue viaduct near 16th Street was really about bringing something pleasant to an otherwise dank passageway on the edge of Pilsen.
“Those viaducts are really dark and gloomy,” says Reynolds, who hails from Belize, spent much of his childhood in far north suburban Waukegan and now lives on Chicago’s North Side.
“So I wanted to do the opposite of that,” Reynolds says. “I just wanted to do something light and airy, at the time I was feeling that way, I really wanted to highlight pretty colors.”
He adds, “It’s not point driven, it’s a piece to make you happy.”
His painting, completed over the summer as part of a larger project by what’s called the Mural Movement, features a woman floating with help from smiley-faced balloons.
Reynolds says, “I came up with the idea once I got there.”
Yes. Another cool aspect of the mural — which is featured this week in the Sun-Times’ ”Murals and Mosaics” series – is its spontaneity.
Speaking of, you’ve probably heard, England’s Queen Elizabeth II died last year. Almost immediately after her death, Reynolds took to a wall at his studio and painted a mural of her face.
Then, 24 hours later, he painted over it with black paint.
Reynolds explained, “I’m from Belize, so she’s our head of state, she’s on our money.”
The small Central American nation was a British colony and remains part of the British Commonwealth, a global network of countries, most of which were once part of the British Empire.
Reynolds says the painting was intended to “pay respects” to the monarch but also convey that, with Britain’s long history of colonization and oppression, ”we have to move past that type of hierarchy and into something different.”
As he wrote on Instagram, “This is now a new canvas to create a new story.”
Wanted to share a couple of other examples of Reynolds’ artwork, including the mural below done on a garage in the Far South Side’s Pullman neighborhood.
Shifting to the far northern edges of the region, Reynolds also did a mural in Zion earlier this year, as shown below.
Certainly hoping everyone has a great Christmas and broader holiday season.
While driving around looking for new murals recently, I snapped a timely photo along the 16th Street railroad retaining walls that’s teeming with public paintings.
Located at Carpenter Street (and no I’m not joking!), it features Mary, who’s revered in Christianity as Jesus’ mother.
Meantime, I also recently drove past what had been a Jewish Community Center in Skokie but now is home to an Assyrian church and cultural space, and the religious mosaics long on the front of the building remain. Two of them are shown below.
The artwork depicts Jewish values and traditions.
Several new murals were recently created, or revitalized, on the South Side via the Chicago Public Art Group.
Below is one of them, by artist Pugs Atomz, a resident of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood.
“These murals are the start of my goal to have an arts corridor on 71st Street from King Drive to Cottage Grove,” he says in a CPAG press release. “I hope to do more murals and get other artists to paint here.”
His painting is on the side of the building housing the Gyrls in the H.O.O.D. Foundation, which provides Black girls “with the reproductive resources, social support services and sexual health education they need to make informed and responsible choices,” according to the group’s web site.
Atomz says he hopes to do more murals nearby this coming year.
