Of the more than 125 portraits that Bruce Elliott has painted of regulars at the Old Town Ale House, one of his favorites is of a friend named Howie Grayck. It took Elliott a long time to get it right: he finishes most of his portraits in a few days, but Grayck’s took more than three weeks. “I almost threw it in the garbage,” Elliott says. “He’s a real sweet guy. Everyone loves him. He always has a smile, but he’s got a certain sorrowful look. There’s a sad quality to it. It’s real elusive, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”
Elliott began frequenting the place in 1961, the year the Klugs got divorced. He got to know regulars like Eddie Balchowski, a heroin addict who was a concert pianist until he lost an arm in the Spanish civil war. (Elliott’s portrait of Balchowski depicts him as he knew him, a gray-bearded old man shooting up, tightening a rubber-band tourniquet with his teeth.) He met Mitchell in 1977 and married her in 1983, and over the years the couple stayed close with the Klugs, who continued to run the bar together. Elliott and Mitchell’s daughter, Grace, thought of the Klugs as grandparents, and all three were frequently at Beatrice’s bedside in the months before she died.
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Elliott was born on the south side and grew up in Downers Grove. He began painting when he was in his late teens, and he’s largely self-taught. What technical education he has he absorbed by sitting in the living room of a Hyde Park town house owned by surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie. An uncle of Elliott’s was part of Abercrombie’s circle, which included jazz musicians, writers, and assorted visual artists. Elliott recalls there was usually a party taking place when he visited. “She was a colossal alcoholic,” he says. “And she was mean. You couldn’t ask her any questions, but she would let you sit there and observe.” He picked up some basics from her, and also learned how to economize: Abercrombie would buy old picture frames at yard sales and flea markets, then cut slabs of Masonite to fit them. (Elliott does the same, though his surface of choice for his Ale House portraits is cardboard.)
Nevertheless, Elliott is badgered by regulars who want their portraits done. But he says he can only successfully complete a piece if he knows the customer well, and he doesn’t accept commissions: “It would be too much like work.” Tourists will sometimes enter the Ale House, take a liking to a picture, and make Elliott an offer–once for $5,000. But he’s too attached to his work to remove it from the walls, and he claims he has no ambition to show his oeuvre outside the bar. (His brother Scott is an art dealer in Benton Harbor, Michigan.) On a recent Tuesday morning, a regular sitting at the bar called out to Elliott. “Hey Bruce,” he said over his beer. “You ever thought about having an exhibit?” Elliott, on his way to the john, waved off the idea. “No,” he said, without breaking stride. “This is my exhibit right here.”
“She had finally straightened out, kind of got her life together,” Elliott says. “She was working for the city at the department of special events. And she had money and her own place, really for the first time in her life. But she kept the pedal to the metal. Her doctors told her to slow down on the drinking and smoking, and that was not ever going to happen.
