People are going nuts over this North Side mural

Forget about this country’s vicious political divide. Andersonville artist John Airo has learned just how aggressively split people are about something that might come across as nuts: squirrels.

He discovered this while painting a mural a few years ago of one of the bushy-tailed rodents on a shop on Montrose Avenue.

He says he’d hear from passersby, “I love squirrels, they’re so funny, so cute.”

“Then,” he says, “there were the haters.”

One time, a car spun by, and one of the young men inside hollered at Airo: “F--- squirrels!”

“I was looking for a text message, figuring it was someone I knew” joking around, Airo says. But, “no one’s confessed to being the guy that yelled that.”

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“It was mean, it was guttural. I just had to laugh.”

But it showed him that “squirrels are the divider. I didn’t know that. There are strong opinions.”

Airo’s thoughts on the tree-climbing creatures?

“I think they’re hilarious,” he says.

But the artist — who creates paintings and sculptures and has created a studio in his garage — wasn’t very good at drawing them. That realization indirectly led to the mural.

“I had tried drawing a squirrel, and it looked terrible,” Airo says. “So I kept trying. And they all looked really bad, like weird cats or raccoons.

“I posted a pic of my mediocre squirrels on social media, and my friend Gerri loved them. So every time I would see her, I gave her a bunch of poorly drawn squirrels.”

The friend, Gerri Brunner, ended up writing a children’s book that she says she’s planning to self-publish about a squirrel named Penelope Nutcracker. She asked Airo to illustrate it, prompting him to realize, “I needed to learn how to make a squirrel.”

Once he figured out “they don’t really have necks,” he was set “and finally got it down.”

Around that time, the Greater Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce was commissioning a mural. Airo submitted two ideas — one he thought they’d like and the other, “the squirrel idea,” mostly as a joke.

“They picked the squirrel,” Airo says.

On the left side of the wall is the animal. On the right is a pile of nuts being, well, squirreled away. Scattered among them, a bag of potato chips popular in Ireland called “Taytos” — a nod to the Celtic store Celtica Gifts at 1940 W. Montrose Ave.

The owner says, “I do love squirrels.”

Airo says, “A lot of people don’t I learned while making it.”

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