Watch The Violet Hour's Latest Artwork Go Up In Time-Lapse

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 11, 2012 3:20PM

The new mural outside The Violet Hour is a stunning portrait of a whale that makes the wait to enter the Wicker Park cocktail lounge (and the longer waits for a table at Big Star across the street) slightly more tolerable.

The mural was designed by Benjamin Oakley Wilson, who also works as a server at Blackbird (Blackbird, The Violet Hour and Big Star all share the same ownership team of Paul Kahan and Donnie Madia). According to filmmaker Max Mearsheimer, a friend of Wilson's who also created the time-lapse video below, they liked Wilson's artwork and let him have the Violet Hour's entrance as a canvas.

It took Wilson three days to create the mural. With the exception of roller work to cover the previous artwork and some detail, it was done all from spray paint. Mearsheimer connected his camera to a Texas Instruments TI-83 graphing calculator via a cable, to run a program that fired the camera's shutter, snapping a photo every five seconds. Mearsheimer then imported all the photos to create a 30-frames-per-second movie, adjusting various aspects along the way to make the film as seamless as possible.

Check it out.

Whale from Max on Vimeo.