A sea of faces stare out from Matthew Jesiolowski’s abstract mural at Chicago Auto Recon Body Shop, 1358 W. Cermak Rd.
Some seem to stare at passersby through thick lashes. Others gaze through a single eyeball. Some flash shy smiles, others toothy grins, and a few show fangs as if out of a nightmare.
“I’ve always enjoyed sort of the chaos,” Jesiolowski says.
He says he draws inspiration for the chaos from the late artist Jackson Pollock and inspiration for the line work from Shel Silverstein, the late, Chicago-born author and artist kids might know from his children’s poetry books.
“The good old Shel Silverstein ‘Light in the Attack’ or ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends,’ those books had an impact on me when I was a kid,” Jesiolowski says.
He employs contour drawing, a style Silverstein used in the black-and-white sketches that fill the pages of his children’s books. Jesiolowski says he takes that further, doing “blind” contour drawing — creating an image without looking at the piece of paper.
“When I drive, I just have a little book,” he says. “I wouldn’t be looking at the book. I’d say, ‘I’m going to draw a hand,’ and do that as I’m driving and then look at it, and it was different, I like the abstraction of it.”
His mural takes up four face-filled squares on an exterior wall of the auto body shop.
It’s his first mural and also his first time using spray paint in a piece. He usually works on glass or canvas with acrylic paint.
“Approaching that initial first block, I was a little anxious,” says Jesiolowski, 45, of Joliet.
While working a construction job after dropping out of college, Jesiolowski says he came across a “beautiful window” a crew was throwing out. He took it home and repurposed it as artwork.
The square mural images were similar to his typical style and were inspired by other works in Pilsen, though more abstract.
“Some of the street artists that are in the city, it’s amazing how lifelike they can make things,” Jesiolowski says. “I’m not one of those. I don’t strive for perfection. I’m definitely more abstract and contemporary.”
Jesiolowski says the mural’s proximity to Benito Juarez High School and Little Village High Schools meant kids often stopped to gaze at the art as he was worked on it.
“It was neat because, with the school being right down the street, there would be kids walking by, like, ‘That’s cool man,’ ” Jesiolowski says.
Anthony Vula owns Chicago Auto Recon Body Shop, which has apprenticeship programs with the schools. He says a friend told him that graffiti artists might be less likely to tag a wall already painted with a mural. So he put out feelers to the art community in Pilsen and held an event for artists, eventually connecting with Jesiolowski.
Vula says, “We just told him what we think would help best for the community, and he came up with what he came up with, and we loved it.”
He says, much like he works with students interested in cars, he now allows artists to use his space to showcase their work and help them connect with other business owners who might want to bring in an artist.
He sees similarities between restoring a car and creating art.
“We go through painstaking, 1,000-hour projects, sometimes 3,000 hours,” Vula says. “We look at the car for the beauty that it is. That’s our creativity that’s going into that project.”
