Artist Allie Kushnir says she couldn’t wait to get rid of this piece of juvenilia. Painted when she was 17, for a New Trier high school art class, the acrylic rendering of a man in a skirt was a mere solution to an assignment.
She gave it away, along with some other schoolwork, and never expected to see or hear about it again.
So she was surprised when I called her last week. She had forgotten that her name was on the back of the canvas.
Now 24, Kushnir’s a University of Iowa grad living in Logan Square and hoping to land a job in graphic design. The old paintings are nothing like her current work, which is mostly in oil, she says. She’s been documenting some of that in process: