Still in Chicago, this week’s art is a pastel crayon/acrylic painting on paper for pens that takes its inspiration from a really blurry photo I took from the L, in the Loop, looking East on West Adams Street. I take a lot of photos on the L, even though they’re pretty unusable as photos because they’ll be blurry, or the windows will be smudged, or I’ll have all sorts of reflections gumming up the works.

However, if I just use these images to inspire a painting I can “fix” these issues and come up with a better image.  In this case, it was a shot of a big red “W” that made me think of the classic 1963 movie, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. However, instead of marking the site where loot from a bank heist was buried, this “W” designates The W Hotel City Center, which aside from having a big “W” on it, is of little interest to me since it’s not a Hilton property and I wouldn’t get any points by staying there.

Anyway, this is a good example of how I’m tryng to incorporate the lessons I’ve learned by studying the work of Edward Hopper into a painting that doesn’t exactly follow his compositional or rendering style that closely.  Working this way also lets me eliminate any annoying features, like ugly cars or extraneous people. It took about three weeks to finish, working on and off, around the Myasthenia Gravis.

If you’re curious about where this photo was taken, here’s a reverse view with the L in the background, courtesy of Google Street View…

To see the painting bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new, slightly-spooky episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a new slightly-spooky edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

We do not have playlists for either show, because our friends over at Haversham are buried under work providing support to international news correspondents, but Nigel tells me his Halloween-season show is devoted to scary-sounding Swedish Psychedelic Rock, while Herman has devoted his entire show to the first two albums by The Alan Parsons Project. Those are great for the season because the first album is based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, while the second is a musical adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I Robot.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of The Frantics on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten more hours of Halloween themed programming, to get you in the mood for the season.