In Wicker Park mural, Laura Catherwood’s ‘Birdfrog’ mural marries nature with whimsy

Catherwood, 32, grew up in Crystal Lake. And she sees nature as her “comfort place.” So, for a mural she did at 1704 N. Damen Ave. in Wicker Park, she imagined one of them shuttling a half-bird, half-frog creature down from the sky.

“Growing up in the Midwest, I have all those really magical memories from childhood of seeing them all fluttering down,” Catherwood says of the seeds everyone around Chicago knows as helicopters.

She painted the mural — named, of course, “Birdfrog” — over three days in September 2021.

She says she wanted to evoke a “peaceful feeling of going with the flow and enjoying the ride. You’re just looking at this odd creature, and you’re not sure where she came from, where she’s going, but it just seems OK.”

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Catherwood moved to Humboldt Park nine years ago and does fine art illustration and works on the side on murals.

She says “Birdfrog,” painted in greens and blues, was inspired by her “memories of catching frogs in the creek and just how exciting it was and how strange they are.”

And the bird? That comes from her childhood, too. She remembers painting “little water colors” and giving her dad a picture every year.

“He loves birds, so I would paint him birds for his birthday,” Catherwood says. “He had basically a timeline of ‘tiny Laura’ to ‘grownup Laura’ getting better at painting side by side.”

Allan Weinberger, an art manager who has arranged for a number of large-scale murals, chose Catherwood for this one after being asked by a city official to “clean up the front facade” of the currently vacant space.

Weinberger says he’s been a fan for years and loves her “whimsical” style.

“She always weaves in some very clever, beautiful storytelling element,” he says.

Catherwood says she aims to create a “narrative” in the worlds she draws, though not so much actually telling a story as evoking a feeling.

“It’s sort of trying to diagram how things feel in a way that leaves it vague,” she says. “It’s not saying it exactly the way a storybook does.”

Given carte blanche with the design, Catherwood turned to a postcard she’d previously created for inspiration.

“I just really liked the feeling of the image a lot, so I reworked it to be a colorful mural for this job,” she says.

Before deciding to be an artist, Catherwood studied molecular biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating in three years and realizing she “can’t live without” art.

“When I went to college and had a very intense scientific major, I suddenly didn’t have time to just draw and paint whenever I wanted, and that’s when I realized how important it was to me,” she says.

She went on to study at an atelier — “a small art conservatory” — to learn “the fundamentals in this very step-by-step, layer-by-layer way of building your understanding and abilities.”

Despite having “switched trajectories,” Catherwood says she “loved molecular biology because it made a lot of the mysteries of life into these little puzzles.”

Now, nature — which she describes as “intimate” and “mysterious” — is a key part of her art.

“I feel like I’m trying to give a close-capture of a moment in the scene of these creatures that I draw,” she says, “a connection with the natural world.”

Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals