the puddle girls 2

 The photo came first.  It was in a copy of the Chicago Historical Society Magazine as part of an article on poor kids at the turn of the century.  What struck me was not so much that they were poor as their different attitudes stepping into the puddle.  Sarah on the left is not sold on the idea but is going along with it.  Julia in the center is just so damn sure of herself, and her sister Bess is following along because she would follow her sister anywhere.  

I wanted to paint the scene maybe fifteen years ago, and I made a few attempts, but failed utterly.  It's hard to paint a group of people together because they all have to have the same proportions, but what was hardest was trying to get the expressions on the girls' faces.  If you try to enlarge them the details blur.  Anyway I tried them and failed, then tried them again some years later with no success, and maybe one more time and again nada.

I am not sure what brought them up lately, but I have finished painting all my bugs  

http://www.bckat.us/KenSchadt/bugs/index.htm 

and I am not sure what my next series will be, and there is a winter break in the watercolor class so I kind of have some free time and I thought I will try it again.  But maybe I will do it a little different.  I will first paint them using only sepia and then I will add some other colors to that, but still they will be mostly monochrome.  

Here is what I have so far.

Yeah I know, not so hot, grotesque even, but this is all very preliminary, we will see where it goes.

But I was so fascinated by their different attitudes that I made up a story about them.  And the story is based on those Harold Robbins style potboilers of the fifties like The Carpetbaggers, lurid tales of beautiful people fighting over money with lots of violence and sex and betrayal.

There is none of that in the story so far, but I am just setting it up,

The photo had fallen out of the magazine years ago and I had like twenty or thirty of those magazines and I didn't want to go through them all and I thought of this facebook page, Forgotten Chicago.  People are always posting things like My uncle Joe Blow had a bar on Damen Avenue in the forties, I don't know where on Damen or what it was called, does anybody remember it or have a photo?  And bam, an hour later there is a photo of the bar, and people with  fond memories of good ol Joe Blow.

So I posted the photo and where I had found it, and asked if anybody had any info on it.  I got like fifty responses (and five hundred likes), and people loved the photo and had this and that to say about it, but there was not a word of where it was taken or when or anything.

Well shit.  I did an image search and there was a book that used the image on the cover.   I google the author's name and came across a mention of her in the fb page of the college she had retired from.  I asked the woman who mentioned her about it, and the handlers of the page and got no response.

I emailed the author of the article and she emailed me back that someone had added the photo to her article and she didn't know anything about it.  I contacted the magazine and it was in some collection of thousands of photos that was not easily searched and I didn't have any access to, and well, I just pestered and finally I came up with the caption and the fact that it had taken place in some settlement house in Bridgeport and not in Pilsen as I had imagined.

Back in prohibition days they had medical liquor much as we have medical marijuana.  You told your doctor you were a helpless alcoholic and he wrote you a script that you could take to the drugstore and get it filled with a fifth.  Walgreens was just beginning then and all that booze money fueled their success.  I read that somewhere and I will do research on it later.

That radical at the end of Beagles's post, never saw him before in my life, nope, nope, I don't know nuthin about him.

Another installment on the story of the puddle girls next year.