UPTOWN — Roughly two years after he unveiled his first oil painting of a CTA service map, Uptown artist Jeffrey Littleton is at work finishing the series.
Littleton, of the Uptown Arts Center, 941 W. Lawrence Ave., is currently working on two more pieces: a zoomed-in painting of the CTA service map and another of the Red Line station in Uptown featuring the iconic Aragon Theatre.
Both paintings, which he predicts will be done in April, will either be displayed in a gallery or in empty storefronts around the neighborhood come springtime, he said. He's also interested in creating a public mural using mosaic tiles.
"A lot of artists paint the CTA trains, but none are interested in the system," Littleton said of his large-scale oil paintings. "It's a connected system, the thread that runs through this city. I wanted to show part of that world, but also if you don't know about the trains, I wanted to make it aesthetically beautiful."
The working title of the series is "Portrait of a System," he said. Littleton was initially inspired by a political map that showed voting patterns using colored blocks that someone tossed in the trash at the Lawrence Red Line station.
The first 8-foot-by-5-foot painting hung in a gallery at 4101 N. Broadway for two weeks in 2013.
Prints of his CTA-inspired series will soon be available as well, he said.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
