Muralist Becky Gourley remembers sitting in Oiistar, her favorite Wicker Park restaurant, and staring at the blank wall across the street that always seemed to get tagged.
For five years, she looked at it and thought, “What I would do to paint that wall!”
So, when the property owners put out a call for proposals in early 2023, she applied. She didn’t get the job. But they called her back later that year “and said we have the wall for you,” Gourley says. It was a different wall on the same building — and her first outdoor mural.
But by then she was pregnant, planning a December wedding and dealing with terrible nausea during her first trimester. Still, “my husband was like, we got this.”
Over the course of six weeks, Gourley painted her detailed line mural of native indigo buntings facing each other, surrounded by intricate images of leaves, diamonds and pompon flowers in vivid shades of red, pink, blue and yellow on a black background.
The mural is on the Bucktown Commons building at 2045 W. Concord Place, just off Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park.
When she started the mural at the end of September, Gourley says she was “basically throwing up” on the boom lift. “I was in pain. I really don’t know how I did it,” she says. “I was saying ‘Lord have mercy’ every second of every day.”
But she soon figured out that she felt best around 9 p.m. So, she would sleep all day before venturing to the mural as others headed to bed. There she worked for as long as she could — usually about three hours at a time. It also helped her avoid traffic, find a parking spot, paint in cooler temperatures and project the image from the top of her car onto the wall to trace.
“So I’d be up on the lift, painting in the cold dark night, pregnant, referencing my mock-up on my phone in one hand and trying to see where the design was projecting but could barely tell. … It’s absolutely insane when I think of it now,” she says.
When she did return during the day to check on her work, she always appreciated comments from the building’s tenants, who would wake up to see what she painted the night before.
That support “truly kept me going,” she says. She finished the mural on her birthday in early November.
Her inspiration for the mural came largely from her love of line drawings, she says. The first application she submitted asked for ideas related to Chicago, and indigo buntings are a native migratory bird that Gourley says she admires. She started doodling a drawing of the bird, and this mural was the eventual result.
The bird is known to represent spirituality, which Gourley says she appreciated during heightened political tensions.
“I was like, let’s focus on our inner self,” she says. “I was trying to do something abstract that would decorate the world.”
That attitude also is why the birds are facing each other and not turned away: “Let’s bring people together,” she says.
Gourley now lives with her husband and 15-month-old son Charlie in Orland Park, where the family moved earlier this year. While she’s taking time off to spend with her son, Gourley says she’s always on the lookout for the next mural commission. Until then, she’s painting a hot-air balloon on the wall of her son’s room above a wicker basket for his stuffed animals.
When she began creating murals in 2017, “The murals started flowing and I never tried to push them too hard,” Gourley says. “Now that I have a baby I’m doing the same thing. I’m doing them when they come.”