Painting Where Chicago Still Echoes
The first thing that tells you a painter is alive isn’t the painting.
It’s the smell.
Open the door to my studio on a hot July afternoon and the odor of oil paint reaches you before anything else does. Linseed oil. Turpentine. Canvas. Dust warmed by the afternoon sun. Paint slowly curing on canvases leaning against the wall, some waiting weeks before they’re ready for another brushstroke, others waiting months. A few have stood there for more than a year because oil paint has its own ideas about time. Some colors seem to dry before you’ve had your morning coffee. Others sit there for weeks refusing to settle down. Sometimes you leave them alone. Sometimes you drag another stroke through the wet paint just to see what it was hiding. A painting might disappear for a month before it decides to show itself again.
People who don’t paint might call the place cluttered. call it evidence.
Inside my studio in the Feather Loft Building.
My studio sits inside Chicago’s Feather Loft Building, a stubborn old brick warehouse alongside the railroad tracks in Fulton Market. Long before the neighborhood filled with restaurants, tech companies, and million dollar condos, it was a place where Chicago came to work. Fulton Market began in the mid nineteenth century as a wholesale produce and livestock district near Haymarket Square, eventually becoming one of the city’s major meatpacking neighborhoods. The Feather Loft earned its name honestly. More than a century ago, workers stood inside these walls plucking chickens by the thousands, sending feathers drifting through the building like dirty snow.
The neighborhood has forgotten much of that history, but the building hasn’t. A few months ago, my landlord was repairing the old freight elevator outside my studio. He’s one of those characters Chicago occasionally produces, a businessman who made one smart investment twenty five years ago and now spends half the year chasing waves somewhere warm. He pried up one of the heavy steel floor plates beneath the elevator. Underneath lay a thick layer of black, rotted chicken feathers, trapped there for well over a century. They had been hidden beneath the floor, waiting for somebody curious enough to look.
About ten years ago, a family would appear once each summer carrying a bouquet of bright flowers. They’d lean them against the brick wall near the tracks, stand there for a moment, then leave without a word. One of their sons had been shot there years earlier, caught up in the kind of life Chicago has always made room for. They came every year, as if the place still had a claim on them.
Then one summer they stopped coming.
Today, Google employees zip past that same stretch of sidewalk on motorized scooters, heading to and from work without giving the old building a second glance. Most have no idea they’re passing a place that once meant everything to somebody. Cities have a way of paving over memory without quite erasing it.
Freight trains pass all day, followed by Metra, rattling the windows and reminding everyone inside that the rest of the city is going somewhere. Eventually, you stop noticing them. Or maybe you paint with them. Their rhythm becomes part of the room, like a palette knife scraping across dried paint or a brush tapping against the rim of a paint can.
Next door, another artist rents a studio. On weekends he cuts hair. Men wait their turn in folding chairs while old basketball games play on a television I can hear through the wall. The announcers drift into my studio between the trains. Sneakers squeak across hardwood somewhere beyond the plaster while I stand before a canvas wondering whether a line belongs where I’ve put it, or whether it needs another week before I can know. It seems an odd combination until you think about it.
A quiet studio would probably make me nervous anyway. In too much silence, you begin to believe every doubtful thought that wanders through your head. A little noise keeps you honest.
Once a year, though, the building changes completely.
During our open studios, the freight elevator becomes the heart of the place. A DJ loads his turntables and speakers onto the old elevator and rides it from floor to floor, spinning records as he climbs through all six stories. The doors slide open, music spills into the hallways, and strangers wander into studios they’ve never seen before. For one evening, the old warehouse becomes a celebration of making things. I sometimes wonder what the workers who plucked chickens here a century ago would think if they could step through those elevator doors now.
Chicago has always been my conversation partner. It speaks in brick and fading signs, in graffiti layered over older graffiti, in rusted fire escapes turned into balconies because somebody decided they should be. Every surface carries evidence that another pair of hands arrived first.
I’ve always been interested in the first mark, the beginning of a journey.
Children never ask permission to draw. Neither do the kids writing their names on viaducts at two in the morning. Somewhere along the way, we learn hesitation. We begin making work that already knows how it’s supposed to end.
People spend years looking for their style as though it’s hidden under a rock. Style is what remains after you’ve painted long enough that pretending becomes too exhausting. It arrives while you’re busy paying attention to something else.
Where the work happens. Inside my studio with a selection of my paintings, and the entrance to the Feather Loft Building in Chicago's Fulton Market neighborhood.
Every painter carries influences the way travelers carry old luggage—filled with admired paintings, remembered places, forgotten conversations, mistakes, victories, and disappointments. The work is arranging them until they sound like your own voice.
Some days that voice disappears. You stand in front of the same canvas for weeks wondering whether you’ve already painted everything you know. Then you soften one edge. Scrape away three days’ worth of work. Lay down a color you swore didn’t belong. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it isn’t. Paintings die from too much attention as often as too little. The trick is leaving before you’ve explained away the mystery. The canvas finally exhales, and you realize it never wanted more paint. It only wanted you to stop interfering.
At the end of every day I clean my brushes.
Not quickly.
Meticulously.
They’re Series 7 Kolinsky sable brushes. Less tools than instruments. Tomorrow they’ll be asked to do something difficult again, and they deserve to begin the day clean.
Outside, the trains keep running. The flowers have disappeared. Google scooters replace mourners, warehouses become offices, and Fulton Market keeps reinventing itself. Yet inside these old brick walls, paintings still take as long as they need.
Tomorrow morning I’ll unlock the studio again. The smell of oil paint will be waiting behind the door, the basketball game next door will drift through the wall, and another train will rattle the windows of a building that has been standing here since chickens outnumbered office workers in Fulton Market. Somewhere in the room, one of those paintings will be waiting exactly where I left it, patient enough to let me think I’d discovered it.