Where three alleys converge in Lincoln Park, a mural speaks to the area’s Victorian architecture

But Hoard thought: Why not put it in the back, where three alleys converge?

The spot offers a good line of sight onto Armitage Avenue, which dead ends there at Racine Avenue and is “the most beautiful street in all of Chicago,” according to Hoard.

“Murals are like paintings in a house,” he says. “You need to find where in the house the painting fits.”

Hoard says he brought in 29-year-old Mexican artist Eskat to create the mural because of the way his style melds realism with an abstract sensibility.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

Eskat called the mural, which he painted in 2019, “En Busca del Camino” — which means “In Search of the Way.”

It stands four stories tall, seeming to snake up the building.

There’s a “symbolic woman” in the piece who’s supposed to be “from the Victorian era but brought to today with art — it’s a contemporary take,” Hoard says, that offers a nod to the many Victorian-style homes found in Lincoln Park.

The eyes in the painting are “a window into the person’s soul that tells who they are on the inside,” says Eskat, who lives in Monterrey and started out in art by doing graffiti because his older brother was into it.

The bees in the mural represent “the worker bee,” the artist says: “hard work and persistence.”

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“It means a lot to me, just to see if I could do a piece of art that big,” Eskat says.

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