Julia Hagen, 28, has developed a large social media following for her series of paintings of Chicago-area hot dog stands. Her studio is located in Logan Square.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Claude Monet had his water lilies; Vincent van Gogh, his sunflowers; and Andy Warhol, his soup cans.
The muse has led Julia Hagen to that most cherished of Chicago still-life subjects: The hot dog.
Well, not the hot dog itself, but the architecture surrounding it.
In her tiny, home art studio in Logan Square, Hagen, 28, is painting hot dog stands — transforming the humble hut, and it’s sometimes garish and mostly neon decor, into oases of nostalgic warmth.
Hagen started last year and she can’t stop; nor would her tens of thousands of followers on social media want her to.
“I now have a list of 50-plus hot dog stands that people want me to paint,” Hagen said on a recent visit to her home. “I’ll keep going until I don’t want to do it anymore or I don’t want to eat another hot dog.”
Hagen, a graduate of the School of Art Institute of Chicago, first came to the public’s attention in a big way two years ago when she painted a birds-eye view of downtown at night in which the streets and freeways are transformed into intersecting ribbons of gold.
That painting, “All of the Lights,” drew some 10 million viewers to Instagram. That’s when Hagen decided to drop into the neighborhoods and focus in on hot dog stands.
“Everyone has had a hot dog or at least, if you live in Chicago, you should have had a hot dog by now. They’re not expensive, very accessible,” she said.
Hagen’s paintings of Wolfy’s, Superdawg drive-in, Gene & Jude’s are online conversation starters — both about her talent and the memories the paintings summon.
“That’s the winner right there!” wrote one Instagram viewer of the Gene & Jude’s painting. “The fries are worth the trip.” (You’ll note the famous real-life discrepancy in the establishment’s name on its signage.)
“I used to live down the street and went here way too often. I love this place and that neighborhood so much! Such a beautiful painting,” wrote a reddit user about Hagen’s rendition of Flub A Dub Chub’s Hot dog and Burger Emporium.
The paintings allow Hagen to indulge her love of light. There’s the warm golden glow of street lamps and the chilly flare of blue neon that you see in her Superdawg painting. She says she blends literally hundreds of acrylic paints to get the range of lights just right.
When she was working on some outdoor tables in her Superdawg piece, it took her an eternity — a full day — to get the pink neon light’s glow on the table the way she wanted it.
“It’s in the foreground; it has to be good,” she said.
Her paintings are nostalgic, but not in a cute, kitschy, Norman Rockwell way. There are no grinning tykes spilling ketchup on their britches, their mouths bulging with too much food. The hot dog stands take center stage — as well as the apartments above, the L tracks, a psychic’s shop next door, the gangways.
“I liked the idea of there being little hidden gems in there that you can discover the more you look at it,” she said.
She describes her work as “whimsical” and “dreamy.”
Hagen sells her “hidden gems,” ranging from about $100 to $150 per print. She sells the originals too, from $450 to $650.
You can see more of Hagen’s work, at juliahagenartist.com.
When she was a student, Hagen would wander through the Art Institute of Chicago during class breaks. She’d stop to admire Monet’s paintings of haystacks or Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.”
“Those two influences are pretty strong in my work,” she said. “Something between Monet and Hopper.”
But would she be ok if, when her obituary is written, she’s described in the headline as the hot dog stand artist?
“I’ll be happy about it, honestly,” she says, before offering her own opening line to the obit: “‘She died a Chicagoan.’”