Can You Paint With All the Colors of a Home Depot Color Swatch
Thursday 10/5/2017 — Chinatown
5:00pm — I stepped off the Cermak Chinatown red line stop to begin my walk. I walked across Archer Avenue to the restaurant part of what tourists call “New Chinatown,” Chinatown Square. It most likely is called that because of the more modern themed restaurants versus the old run down look of the Wentworth part of “Old Chinatown.” My colors for this walk is a dull red and a faint orange, which is fortunately the main colors of Chinatown and can be seen just about everywhere. Across Archer Avenue is a bunch of stores and restaurants all lined up like townhouses, the furthest to the right is a Citi Bank, and next to it, a building called Mayflower Food Inc. I notice this establishment immediately because its sign is a dull red with faint orange lettering in its English and Chinese translations.
5:05pm — Back on the side of Archer where the train station is, is the new Chicago Public Library (previously on Wentworth Avenue) with the restaurant Phoenix Restaurant to its right, with red lettering. I walk further down Archer to the Walgreens and notice the official Chinatown Square sign. Around China Pl, there is access to the deeper part of Chinatown Square where more restaurants, candy shops, and various stores are hidden. I walk around to this area and I notice that in front where Archer is, the building look unkempt and old, very basic; but from this little area, the other sides of these buildings are lively. People walk in and out, talking loudly with their company. You can more easily smell the food from the different restaurants and peek in through their glass windows. The building themselves have a more Chinese architecture, instead of the lifeless box it shows on the other side. Here I find the first two objects.
As I walked in through the “North Gate” the walls of the buildings had stones of animals colored for art. This is where I found a brick painting of a bird in a dark red. In was enclosed in a circle and the bird itself stood on one leg, with its wings flared out like how most birds perform their mating call. Across from the red bird was a yellow brick with a green turtle fighting with a green snake. This picture was also enclosed within a circle in the brick.
Right in front of me I see part of the townhome like structure of all of these stores, it is a tower that is twice the height of the stores with shingles the same color as my color swatch with a dull red trim.
The stores themselves are lined with a dull red pattern as a fence on the second level of stores. To the right was the first faint orange object I saw, a hanging sign for one of the restaurants “Saint’s Alp Teahouse and Gourmet.” As I head out through the China Pl side of the restaurants, I noticed something about the townhomes across the street. All of the rows of townhomes are all the same architecturally, but also, the color scheme was exactly like my color swatches with a dull red bottom and faint orange top.
5:20pm — I walk back through Archer Avenue to Wentworth Avenue where a sign on one side is English and the other side is in Chinese for “Welcome to Chinatown” with a Chicago Marathon banner up for Sunday’s race.
To one side of Wentworth is a restaurant called Triple Crown with a similar Chinese architecture, and faint orange lettering on all of its signs. Across the street was a big building with the same architecture called Pui Tak Center. Pui Tak Center is a resource provided by Chinese Christian Union Church (CCUC) that provides tutoring, ESL classes, and instrument/music classes and computer classes. To the left of Pui Tak Center was a store called Gifts R Us, it was a knick knack store that smelled like ceramics and porcelain. In Gifts R Us I found the third and fourth objects, an orange ceramic owl statue, and a dull red dragon. All along the walls of Gifts R Us were all sorts of knick knacks. Some were animal themed, dragon themed, chinese umbrellas, chopsticks, waving kitty cat statues, bobbleheads, and posters. It was a very small and not packed with customers, however it was cramped with merchandise.
Reading Response:
A map is a representations of people’s experiences. There are different kinds of maps, some are mapping specific territories and other different qualities kind sounds, color schemes, and what is seen. Krygier & Wood define a map in several different forms. One form was to establish beneficial areas, they gave the example of where there was prime caribou calfing land so people could find it. They also described political maps where countries are separate and sovereign territories are established. The map is related to the world it depicts because it can take so many different kinds of forms. In the example of Autumn Leaves, the map was the different colors for a particular leaf and where those colors are relative to the leaf. Another sound map showed the different kinds of sounds someone experienced on a walk or whatever mode of transportation they used. Whatever someone wants to map, they can. Maps are an interpretation of a specific trait and place that trait(s) on a specific region.
