William Dolan

This is part of a series of paintings based on 1970s car colors. The featured color is Bittersweet Mist, a burnt orange that was sprayed onto some Buicks in 1971. In this case, it is a Skylark that is ironically in front of the Skylark Lounge, a cool old bar at Cermak and Halsted on Chicago’s South Side.

Unfortunately it is in an area that is poised to get swallowed up by the gentrification that is starting to infect the city south of the Loop. In fact, not only has the Maxwell Street neighborhood to the North, been overly gentrified, but the old place was completely leveled. There are new suburban psuedo-downtowns that have more of an urban feel than what you would find at University Place^TM, just a mile or so to the north of the Skylark.