January 2021 - St. James Chapel

                                  

 St. James Chapel   Chicago

Limited edition of 10

plate size 7.5 x 7 inches

St. James Chapel on Rush Street

The third quarter kept me busy with Watercolors and two of these are shown in this blog. 

I completed one medium size etching aquatint of the St. James Chapel, formerly known as Quigley Preparatory Seminary, on Rush at Pearson Streets. 

Here are some historic details about this little known site.

     From 1918 to 2007, Quigley Preparatory Seminary housed the Saint James Chapel that served and comforted seminarians by the thousands, providing a place in which Quigley friends and benefactors might be thanked, mourned, and honored.

     Quigley's Saint James Chapel, inspired by Paris' Sainte Chapelle, was completed in 1919. Its French Gothic Revival design, with its arched windows and soaring vertical buttresses, and exterior walls surrounded and guarded by statues of saints, has been called "a hidden jewel" in the midst of a bustling commercial and residential neighborhood on Chicago's Gold Coast.

     In 2007, the high school seminary was closed. It reopened in December 2008 as the completely refurbished Archbishop Quigley Center, one of the two new locations for the ministerial offices of the Archdiocese.

Two watercolors recently completed.

   DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus Gate

   at Halsted, Lincoln and Fullerton Avenues

                                   

                                    

                          The Chicago River Wacker Drive without Bridges

This watercolor is a view of the buildings on Wacker Drive along the Chicago River from Michigan Avenue om the East to Franklin on the West and no bridges.  It is 4 x 12 inches in size.  I did this with pen and pencil and finally added hand coloring.

 

                           China Town  at  Wentworth Avenue and 22nd Street

                                                   Chicago

    Etching Aquatint with hand coloring 

Limited Edition on Somerset Radiant White

Plate 154   7.5 x 9 inches

The issues of the  Black Lives Matter movement struck me hard in 2020.  I was drawn to the poem by Langston Hughes and  I quote it here:   

I, Too

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47558/i-too