Our Monday art this week is a real-life, small-scale painting, based on a digital painting inspired by the trip your PopCulteer took to Chicago back in February, which seems like a lifetime ago now.

This is my depiction of the palm trees in The Crystal Garden at Chicago’s Navy Pier. It was sort of bizarre hanging out around palm trees in a giant glass atrium in freezing cold weather, but it inspired me to do a digital painting based on a composite of different photos. I posted that on Instagram almost three months ago, but this weekend revisited it and produced this version on a tiny canvas using a variety of different media, including oil pastel crayons, acrylic paints, water color markers and just a little Testor’s enamel.

After last week I was reluctant to put this in the scanner, so this is close-up photo of the finished piece, taken in the lightbox I usually use to photograph toys.

You can click the image if you want to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight hours of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, because Sydney Fileen’s New Wave Music showcase will be missing in action this week due to a Radio Free Charleston Memorial Day marathon. 3 PM sees an encore of a recent episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…