Top: Artists Candace Klein and Todd Lyon. Bottom: Artist Heidi Harrington. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Just off State Street, artist Heidi Harrington sat up perfectly straight, analyzing a patch of skin just beneath model Teresa Joseph’s lower lip. A few feet in front of her, Joseph leaned back on a forest green chaise, her shoulders glowing against the crushed velvet. Early afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows, winding its way around a small forest of potted plants. Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” drifted through the studio.
Harrington raised her brush to canvas, and began to add shadow and texture on Joseph’s chin, just to the right of her lip. Nothing—not the music, not the occasional ringing phone, not the whispering, damp brushes—could tear her away from this moment.
Harrington, who has been painting since she was a child in England, is a member of the New Haven Brush & Palette Club, a tight-knit group of artists who meet each Tuesday morning at Adae Fine Art Academy to paint from a live model who sits for three hours, and then returns for three to four weeks. A year after losing their longtime home at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA), longtime members of the group are putting out a call for new members, in an appeal that is directly tied to their survival.
“This [club] is a certain kind of old-world luxury that you don’t have a lot anymore,” said member Todd Lyon, an avid painter and longtime member of the group who may be more widely known as the co-owner of Fashionista Vintage & Variety. “And that is to have a model sit in the same position for up to four weeks, in the same outfit and the same pose. It’s so, so rich it’s like being a billionaire, surrounded by all this beauty.”
And yet, “this is one of the things that is so good, it’s bound to become extinct,” she continued. That’s what she fears. “Look at the Ely Center! That was supposed to go on forever and ever and ever in perpetuity.”
Diane Chandler on Tuesday morning.
In some ways, the group’s predicament—that membership has begun to dwindle as its location has changed—is as old as it is new. In over a century of existence (the club was founded around 1902, said President Diane Chandler), the Brush & Palette Club has changed homes many times, although not for several decades between 1961 and 2025.
Before the middle of the 20th century, its artists hopped around, from locations on Court, Center and Orange Streets to the old Palladium Building, according to reporting from the Daily Nutmeg. Then in 1961, the group moved into the historic John Slade Ely House at 51 Trumbull St., where resident Grace Ely had set up a trust in her name designed to protect the space as an artists’ haven in perpetuity. Grace, whose husband had died in 1906, passed away in 1959, setting the trust into motion.
In that initial document, Grace Ely named both the New Haven Brush & Palette Club and the New Haven Paint & Clay Club, which is still in existence, as groups invited to work in the building. And so for decades, both made their home there. Most recently, they operated alongside the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA), which itself operated under the not-for-profit auspices of the Friends of John Slade Ely House of Contemporary Art, Inc.
In 2022, it looked for the first time that ECoCA might need to move, as a developer announced that it would buy the Ely House from ECA/ACES (at the time the owner) for $800,000. In a kind of miraculous save, Friends of John Slade Ely House was able to buy back the building for nearly $1 million—but not without strings attached.
The $800,000 that the organization spent at the time was part of a loan from brothers and business partners Carmine and Vincenzo Capasso, who reserved the right to end the loan. They did so in early 2024, buying the building back in April of that year for $1.2 million.
For a while, they allowed the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA) to remain in the building. Then last fall, the developers announced that the organization would need to leave the building by the end of the year. That meant that the Brush & Palette Club also needed to find a new home. Members scrambled to take the group's history with them: Harrington still safeguards a painting that looks like it's from the early 20th century, with women wearing long, formal dresses.
When ECoCA announced that it would be moving temporarily to CitySeed’s building at 162 James St. last year, it wasn’t the right fit for club members, Lyon said (“loyalists were so used to working in a drafty old studio with wooden floors and rickety easels that the City Seed space seemed an uncomfortable fit,” she wrote in an email). Then after months of searching, artist Kwadwo Adae offered up space, in the East Rock storefront he’s called home since 2019.
What’s so extraordinary about Brush & Palette, Lyon said, is that artists have the chance to paint from a live model once a week, and that same model returns for three to four weeks. For her, that feels like both a rarity and a gift: most classes that paint from a model meet once, or maybe twice. Here, artists have the opportunity to return to the same canvas over and over again, filling in more nuance and detail each time.
If they’re a relatively fast painter—which Lyon, who attended Parsons School of Design and the Hartford Art School, is—they have the chance to capture the model from different angles. She can’t remember another setting where that’s possible.
“When you’re doing your academic work, you're doing this drawing of the figure and it just whizzes by, and in this case you can actually develop a painting from beginning to end in oils,” she said, “You kind of feel like you’re in the 1890s or something. None of us, on our own, could hire a sitter like that.”
But together, paying $20 per session, the group can make that happen (all media, from charcoal to acrylic to iPad illustration, are welcome and encouraged). The problem is that members have continued to drop off following the club’s move out of 51 Trumbull St. Most sessions, there are only four or five artists—enough to sustain the club and cover a live model, but not enough to ensure the club’s long-term survival. Rent, which Brush & Palette pays Adae to use the space, comes out of Grace Ely’s Trust.
“It’s part of a problem that’s been happening with a lot of arts organizations,” said Chandler, who has been the club’s president for 11 years. “People are aging. There are not as many young people as we would like. We meet Tuesday mornings, so people who have nine to five jobs can’t really come … a lot of clubs are having the same issues.”
Candace Klein, who has worked at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) and run a business out of New Haven's Erector Square, works on an image in gouaches.
As sun streamed through the studio’s street-facing windows Tuesday morning, it was easy to see the dynamic that makes the club so special. Lyon took a seat close to the chaise, thick circles of paint squeezed into takeout containers in front of her. To her right, resting on a folded cloth already smeared with paint, a dozen brushes waited for their moment in the spotlight, the tips each a different thickness and width. In her left hand, she held a hydrant-red lollipop—a tool she keeps in her arsenal for insulin crashes that hit during painting sessions.
“This is my favorite place to be,” she said. She added a smear of brown around the smudged white of Joseph’s top, a deep V over which two gold-colored necklaces dangled. What seemed like every few seconds, she looked from the canvas back to her muse, and then back to the canvas. If a person listened for it, they could almost hear the canvas breathing against the brush.
Across from her, Harrington barely moved as her eyes traveled from model to canvas and back again. On the easel in front of her, a study of Joseph’s face was taking shape, the colors still muted. Every so often, she lifted a phone where she had also taken a picture of Joseph—a phenomenon that some portrait purists refer to as “double dipping,” because they don’t think it’s proper to take photographs of live models.
Harrington, who moved to New Haven four and a half years ago after years in New York City and Trumbull, said that it’s a special mix of sustained focus and artistic community that keeps her coming back. Even as a kid, she was interested in visual art, including painting her parents as they sat and read the paper in their home in Hertfordshire, England.
After years of formal training, including a scholarship that brought her to Spain, and a class in France during which she met the New Haven painter Frank Bruckmann, Harrington moved to the U.S. for marriage in 2004. A little less than two decades later, her work brought her permanently to New Haven, where she lives in the city’s Westville neighborhood.
While she’s done figure drawing and portraiture many times, across many institutions— once a month, she volunteers as a monitor at Kehler Liddell Gallery, where there is a class on the third Friday of each month—the Brush & Palette Club is consistently the most rigorous and the most reliable. Plus, “the people are very, very nice,” she said with a smile. That, and she feels like she’s surrounded by some of the most interesting New Haveners around.
One of them is Candace Klein, who for years taught at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) while running an interior design business. A graduate of the Paier College of Art, Klein is by nature wildly expressive: she makes with upcycled clothing, and crochets and knits when she’s not painting (during the first months of Covid-19, Lyon and Klein also churned out hundreds of masks, including many donated to the residents of the Mary Wade Home in Fair Haven).
So it made sense 15 or 20 years ago, when she joined the Brush & Palette Club, that it just clicked. She’s loved it ever since. Like other members, she pointed to both the company the club provides—there’s no substitute for being in creative community—and the relative rarity of working from a model, much less the same model, who strikes the same pose for several weeks.
“My favorite is portraits,” she said. Somewhere in the studio, a timer set for 20 minutes had gone off, and Joseph rose from the couch to walk around. Within minutes, she was talking to Klein about her experience in New Haven, the two mutually fussing over each other as they shared stories. Piece by piece, Joseph showed off her tight bodice and layered skirt, all upcycled from old outfits lying around the house. She extended her left arm, as if about to offer a greeting, and began to talk about the bangles that lined her wrist.
“I’ve rediscovered my state of amusement,” Joseph announced before she returned to the chaise, threading a paint-splattered brush between the fingers of her left hand.
“That’s really it,” Lyon chimed back in. She pointed to the magic of existing on State Street, in a kind of DIY creative corridor that includes the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-Op, a crafting collective where the Polmag Deli stood until last year, the longtime incubator East Street Arts, and recently Thrift2Death, which returns later this year. “To me it's miraculous that in the middle of New Haven we have this.”
The New Brush & Palette Club meets each Tuesday at 10 a.m. at Adae Fine Art Academy, 840 State St. in New Haven.