Last July when I went to Chicago to see True West, we stayed at The Wit, a hotel right on the Northern edge of The Loop.  This week’s art is yet another pencil drawing using the Blackwing Palamino pencil that has been my weapon of choice of late. I took several photos from the lobby, and used elements of those as reference for this pencil rendition of a street scene, looking out at North State Street, just outside of the fabled Loop.

That sculpture in the center of the drawing is Loop Da Loop, by John Adduci, which was installed in 2017 and which is often misidentified as “Gateway” on some maps. I’m looking your way, Google maps.

I worked on this one at a more leisurely pace over the last couple of weeks s that I didn’t cramp up my hands. Going for photorealism is a challenge and a great exercise in regaining pencil control and hand-eye coordination, but it’s really just an exercise. I’m hoping to get my chops back so that I can go off in some more surrealistic directions and inject a bit more creativity into my work.

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon presents eight hours of holiday music starting at 7 AM. You can expect to hear more blooks of holiday tunes over the coming weeks as we use the shortened Christmas season as an excuse to slack off and bring you special programming. At 3 PM we are expecting to bring you am encore episode of Prognosis from a couple of months ago with Herman Linte presenting quality progressive rock music.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Also, some time after noon today you can expect one more entry in The 2019 PopCult Gift Guide. With our new plan for the gift guide, the plan is to continue to offer up a gift idea or three every day until December 13.