There’s something unsettling about the contorted faces painted on a brick wall of a building on Belmont Avenue just east of California Avenue.
There’s the ghoulish guy whose eyes are out of alignment and the trail of spots that extends from the top of his skull to the tip of his nose.
There’s the bluish, haloed figure with thin, white lines — might they be tears? — seeming to streak down his cheek and chin.
And there’s the character with one eye blood red, the other dead, as well as with bright, red lips, a hunched shoulder and flaming horns.
A closeup of the mural on Belmont Avenue.
Robert Herguth / Sun-Times
Clare Bollnow and the graffiti artist who goes by Joos created the mural on the side of Peterson Picture Frame Co. in May. Bollnow is fine with people getting an uncomfortable feeling from that mural or her other work.
“Some of the paintings I do of people, some of it’s really heavy,” says Bollnow, 27, who has a studio in Humboldt Park. “I think we’re not used to sitting with our feelings. In the social media age, we have five seconds to consume an image. You can scroll past stuff that makes you feel bad.
“That’s something I think is a travesty because I think sometimes people don’t know what to do when they see powerful work, not even mine, but sit with work that makes them feel uncomfortable or uncomfortable in a way they’re not used to.
“I want to make work like that even though it may not have as big of an audience or a demand.”
Artist Clare Bollnow in her Humboldt Park studio.
Owen Ziliak / Sun-Times
She says her murals and other creations can be “polarizing work. There are people that love it and that totally f------- hate it. But I’m totally fine with that because it makes people feel something.”
Bollnow, who lives in Ukrainian Village, grew up in the west suburbs so close to Brookfield Zoo she could sometimes hear lions roar. She attended Fordham University.
As a kid, she liked drawing and took art courses in high school, “but it was pretty low-key.”
After high school, she says, “I was really deep in my addiction for a while,” consuming drugs and alcohol. “I got sober for the first time in 2018. I was sober for a year, relapsed, then got sober in 2019. It’ll be four years on Aug. 19. It’s pretty exciting.”
“I remember when I was using,” she says. “I would sometimes try to sit down and draw, and literally my brain would say, ‘You’re not creative any more’ and ‘You can’t do it.’ Nothing would come out.
A closeup look at one of the faces in the mural Clare Bollnow and the graffiti artist known as Joos painted in Avondale in May.
Robert Herguth / Sun-Times
“When I got sober, I started doing these stupid little water colors. I don’t even know why I started doing it. I felt I needed to pass time because you’re kind of psycho when you quit drugs.
“I started doing that, and it just started spilling out.”
As her work evolved, Bollnow says, “I started painting people because that makes sense to me, and they’re really expressive, and I have a lot of feelings inside. And drawing people and bodies . . . they’re the language I speak.
“I realized I liked painting on big canvases,” she says. “None of it was a real conscious decision. It was something that came out of me getting clean.
“It also keeps me sane. I don’t want to use drugs or drink any more. But I definitely need to paint and do art so that I maintain my sanity a little bit. It’s a really, really important outlet for me.”
Bollnow says: “The drinking and using was because I didn’t have to feel, feel reality or my discomfort and pain. And when you get sober, you don’t have those crutches any more. So that was really the catalyst for stuff coming out.
A painting by Clare Bollnow.
“All of my art comes from my feelings. I couldn’t make art if I didn’t have any.”
Bollnow says she doesn’t totally plot out what she’s going to paint on a wall or a canvas: “I don’t know what the face is going to look like before I start painting it. Even while I’m painting it, I’m not sure what it’s going to look like.”
In the mural on Belmont, she says, “That dude on the right with the horns, I didn’t intend to have a dude with a dead eye, but that’s what it ended up being.”
She says she didn’t have a theme in mind.
“I don’t like putting a big ‘this is what that means’ on my work,” Bollnow says. “I have a big problem with a lot of art being made that has some kind of, for lack of a better word, a joke behind it that not everybody gets.
“I think, when you look at a person” in a piece of art, “it’s something that everybody can understand in whatever way they want to or that it hits them.”
And how does she know when a project is done?
“The way I describe it, it sings,” she says. “When I know it sings, I stop, and I move on.”
