Their pigtails are linked together, and hands emerge from seemingly nowhere to cover their eyes.
Detached eyeballs hover about while a moth, its wings outstretched, appears in the middle of it all.
With so much going on in the painting, it would be easy to miss what’s perched in the lower right: a praying mantis — a winged insect that blends in well in gardens and elsewhere because it looks like nothing so much as a small branch or stick.
“I’ve had praying mantises come and visit me when I’m painting multiple times before,” says Chloe Becky, the artist who painted the mural on Avondale Avenue between Talman and Rockwell avenues over three days in October.
“And I got a visit from one” while doing this mural, Becky says. “He just flew and landed on the wall.”
It was a nonnative species from eastern Asia called Tenodera sinensis. She thought: This should be part of the mural, too. And so it is.
“I have a huge connection, a spiritual connection, to these insects,” says Becky, who’s 31 and lives in San Diego. “They’re very unusual.”
The praying mantis is just one of the nods to nature in her mural.
The girls in the painting have “their eyes covered by another being; If you notice, their arms are down beside them,” Becky says. “The idea is being disconnected from nature and being disillusioned by the society we live in, being shut off to certain knowledge, different ways of being.”
Why the girls?
“I guess the innocence of two girls,” she says, explaining that she sometimes paints and only later thinks about why she created the images she did, that any meaning behind those sometimes aren’t even clear to her right away.
Whatever she thinks was behind what she paints, Becky says what she really enjoys is seeing how people will look at her art and have their “own interpretation” and “put that puzzle together on their own.”
She says she did have something in mind with the interlocking pigtails — to signify “that all people are connected in some way.”
And the floating eyeballs?
Well, Becky says, “I have a thing about eyeballs.
“The reason they’re floating, not really attached to anything, is because it’s hard to decipher what’s real and what’s not” at times, especially these days.
In the past, she says, “We’ve had, I think, better sights and vision about what’s real.”
OK, and what about the moth and flying grasshoppers that Becky also included?
“I wanted to incorporate little pieces of nature and overlooked pieces of nature,” she says. “Insects are such a pivotal part of our ecosystem,” yet many people “are disgusted by them and don’t put a value on them.
“They’re incredibly beautiful and kind of miraculous. They’re alien-like. And, to me, they’re gorgeous, but so many have disdain for them because I guess they’re creepy. But they’re very important to us as a species and a world.”
Becky doesn’t sign her real name to her work. Instead, she paints under the name “Elsie the Cowww.” She says that’s “my little homage” to her great-grandfather David Reid, an artist and advertising figure credited with creating the Elsie the Cow character associated for decades with the Borden Dairy brand and Elmer the Bull, used by the makers of Elmer’s glue.
Reid died when Becky was a child, but she says she’d spent “time with him in his little art studio. He always talked to me about art because I was interested in art at a young age.
“I always drew a lot. I think I mostly drew with colored pencils and stuff when I was a kid.”
Today, her art involves “a lot of different mediums, I make sculptures and videos,” as well as puppets and dolls, “but I’d say painting murals is probably my favorite.”
She was raised in San Diego and had been to Chicago just once before coming last fall to paint the mural in Logan Square.
“I just was kind of reaching out through the Internet trying to find a wall to paint,” she says, and someone who lives in the Avondale Avenue building — with a big, barren block wall facing the Kennedy Expressway — saw her online post and “gave me full rein” artistically “to do whatever I wanted to do.”
“I don’t get a lot of opportunities here in San Diego,” she says. “The town isn’t really cultivating of arts, especially large public arts, Chicago is much more friendly.”
The townhouse resident, Davin Mehrbani, says he loves art and knew the wall would be perfect for a giant mural when he bought his unit a year or so ago. It has more than 1,000 square feet of open space and is visible from the Kennedy.
At first, looking for an artist in Chicago to do the mural, he struck out.
“I started exploring other artists on Instagram,” Mehrbani says. “Honestly, I don’t know how I found Chloe to begin with.”
He liked her paintings that she’d posted. He says they had a “darker” vibe that he appreciated. And he liked her “story.”
“She posted an Instagram reel or story of, like, every mural she’d ever done, and, at the end of it, she said, ‘I’m really dying to do a mural, please DM me,’ ” Mehrbani says.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing, I have a wall, I love your work.’ ”
