It’s 12:45 on a sunny Wednesday in Lakeview, and a man in a dark teal robe has just stepped out of his tiny kitchen and onto his back porch. He does this almost every day, cell phone in one hand and Kamel Red in the other, usually making a second appearance in the evening. Sometimes the cell phone is replaced by a book, which he reads standing up while he smokes.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I try to take things we walk by without noticing and try to make people notice–think about what is beautiful and what is not,” says Huddle, who’s had about a dozen of his oils on exhibit at Mars Gallery since May. “Just to make people slow down a little. I mean, I slow down for four or five months to paint each one of these.” Employed as a contract lawyer at Wildman Harrold, the 43-year-old puts in half weeks at his 30th-floor office. With the rest of his days he observes the vistas from his back porch.
“I don’t paint things I consider inherently ugly,” Huddle says. He focuses on “how light hits buildings.” Yet sometimes people look at his paintings and tell him his colors look more like Florida than Chicago. “Well, you’re just not looking closely” is his usual reply. “People don’t really understand how sun affects surfaces,” he says. “Edward Hopper was such a brilliant strategist with light. His light was so carefully placed and calculated. I’m just at the very beginning of understanding how light works.” In many Hopper paintings, human figures are solitary and distant; the neighbor on the far porch may end up being the only person in Huddle’s alley painting. He’s sensitive to “the isolation you can feel in a very crowded city. Sometimes the mutability of the city fascinates me. You can remake yourself. That’s one of the things I wanted to do when I came up here.”
Two months after starting the alley landscape, Huddle reports that he has decided to paint the green and yellow “WM” on the Waste Management dumpsters. “While I’m not trying to do photographic replicas, the painting needs to announce a place that helps ground it,” he says. He also notes that a detail has changed: the guy across the alley got a new bathrobe. This one’s white, which will work into the color scheme better than the original teal. “Like the rest of the world, he’s blithely unaware of my artistic needs,” says Huddle, chuckling. “But in my world these are the dramas.”
