Say what you will about Vermeer, no one at Palette & Chisel, the city’s venerable north-side artists’ club, would be caught dead practicing the coloring-book version of fine art. Within the club’s handsome Victorian confines, artists who project images on canvas before painting them are regarded with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The crux of Palette & Chisel is painting what you see, not tracing photography–that’s cheating,” says the group’s president, Val Yachik. “The best training you can get is learning how to look at a landscape or a model, how to discern what it is you’re seeing, and how to put it on canvas. We’ve seen some well-known artists come here to work with the figure and then sneak out the door at the break because they couldn’t do it.”
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Since its founding 110 years ago by students at the School of the Art Institute, Palette & Chisel has focused on painting from life. Its third-floor ballroom studio is Chicago’s longest-running open workshop (and a huge bargain even for nonmembers: ten bucks gets you a three-hour group sitting with a live model). While the 20th century marched off into abstraction and conceptualism, P & C stuck to its figurative and representational roots–the stodgy domain of illustrators and dilettantes. Now that figurative work is back in favor in certain quarters of the art world, P & C members are still unfazed, continuing to paint and sculpt what they see. They might supplement a sitting with a photograph, Yachik says, but they’re not interested in producing photo-realism: “This is the world as seen by the human eye.”
P & C now has 263 members, 50 of them from out of town. “I think of it as like a health club,” Ewers says. “If everyone showed up at once, we’d have to close the doors.” That doesn’t happen, he adds–as in most organizations, there’s an active core group; the bulk of the membership is there less frequently. The annual budget is about $400,000, and the club’s running in the black, with income coming from dues, classes, gallery commissions, studio rentals, and donations. The 17 studios scattered through the house’s bedrooms, basement, and coach house rent for $144 to $440 per month, and there’s a long waiting list for vacancies. “Our philosophy is to provide services as inexpensively as possible,” Ewers says. Dues are $360 a year and haven’t been raised for more than a decade; they’re primarily used to pay for the club’s 60 hours a week of workshops with live models. Studio rents recently went up 10 percent, but that was the first increase in eight years. Classes bring in the most revenue–$129,000 last year.
WHEN: Through 2/28: Mon-Fri 2-7 PM, Sat-Sun 1-6 PM
