Western Avenue Series

Mile 13: 25th-16th Streets
This painting is a part of my Western Avenue Series, through which I'll be making 24 watercolor paintings, one to document each mile of Western Avenue, in Chicago.  I started this project because while it is not considered to be among the most “beautiful” of Chicago’s streets, Western Avenue is a perfect place to document the humanness of Chicago, the positive and the negative. In the words of Stuart Dybek, "Western, with apologies to State Street, is a great street,  Unlike State, it is a street that goes to the interior, the heart of the city, as it glides and glows through a United Nations of neighborhoods."  Check back next Monday to see a post about the next mile of Western.

This painting features one of the modest homes which line the streets of Pilsen.  This small house is nestled among the larger and more commercial buildings, which line Western, but it certainly typical of the urban fabric in this area.  The entrance of these homes are typically a full story above the exposed basement, which offers the opportunity for small gardens to flourish below the street level and gems to be hidden out of the view of the unobservant passerby.  


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What do you think of these Pilsen homes?