Art Persists with Jamie Chiarello
Sometime last year, when I was stealing toilet paper from various establishments and didn’t have two quarters to rub together, I was introduced to Jamie Chiarello. A Jackson Square painter and art critic, Chiarello hosts figure drawing sessions out of her home. Down on cash and on my last roll of toilet paper, I reached out to her on Instagram, explaining I was broke and hoping to land a gig within the week. Sure enough, she booked me that Thursday night. It was the first time I stood naked in a room full of fully clothed people, and I immediately felt its tonic effect.
On March 11, I pulled up to her house. She sat on the front steps, apron on, barefoot, gessoing fresh canvases under a gray sky that promised rain. For a while, we talked about the political climate—how you could step outside the World War II Museum and see its reflection in current events.
She had gone the day before to review the Degenerate! art show, a collection of artists Adolf Hitler deemed unacceptable. “Bad art,” she admitted, half laughing, half worried that she agreed with part of that judgment. Aside from Käthe Kollwitz, whose work she described as visceral and horrifying, much avant-garde felt flimsy to her. She could appreciate the cultural pushback against both fascism and rigid traditionalism, but believed that art—even conceptual work—needed structure. Without it, it became too disembodied.
Chiarello, who feels art school tends to break the artistic spirit, was self-taught and trained through workshops. She now suggests ateliers, like the Blue Easel Club or New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, as an alternative to traditional art school—spaces where technique and tools can ground conceptual work. She told me she wanted to engage with the objective world in a way that acknowledges that there is an objective reality.
For a long time, she had all the artistic freedom in the world, but not the freedom to make a decision. Structure, she realized, made that possible. It gave her the ability to paint what she sees as accurately as she can.
I asked how long she had been selling paintings and hosting figure drawing sessions, and an entire life unfolded in front of me. In 2003, at 18, she was selling her work in New York subway stations and Union Square, obsessed with meaning. She would write personal essays, seal them in envelopes, then create paintings based on them. If someone was interested in her work, she’d ask them to fill out philosophical questionnaires—“Do you exist? How are you sure, or unsure, of this?” At the time, she wasn’t concerned with the communal aspect of art or what anyone else was doing. She had a kind of tunnel vision, focused entirely on her own growth and development as an artist.
In 2004, she grew tired of New York’s ambition and moved to New Orleans. After selling art on the street, she understood the importance of respecting veteran vendors’ turf. Noticing that many local artists had permits, she was careful not to step on anyone’s toes. She set up near the old A&P (now Rouses) on Royal Street.
One day, a little Italian guy named Barry approached her, complimenting her paintings with a kind of valley girl inflection: “These are so cool!” He bought a few pieces, then helped her get set up in a new spot in Pirates Alley. That’s when she saved up and bought her permit to sell in the French Quarter, eventually inching closer to Jackson Square.
After a while, she began to feel her paintings were watered down and she turned to a built-up pile of oil paints passed down to her from other artists. Before taking classes, she spent six months in a kind of hermit mode. After getting off work around midnight, she’d come home and stay up all night, trying again and again to “make it do stuff,” then sleep through the day, with no social life to speak of.
In 2008, Chiarello began attending classes with local pastel painter Sandra Burshell above the since-shuttered Fair Grinds in Mid-City. After a while, not wanting to haul her paints back and forth, she started hosting figure drawing sessions out of her own apartment. What began as convenience turned into something she loved—bringing together random combinations of people in a shared space.
She started charging participants to build a small reserve, so that even if only two people showed up, she could still pay the model. Around this time, she also began figure modeling herself, learning the format I now know well: pose for 20 minutes, break for 10, then back on again—a cycle repeated for three hours.
At some point in our lives, we are kicked out of our Garden of Eden. Chiarello, no exception, was displaced by love—moving repeatedly with an ex-partner—and faced new housing challenges. The shift from landlord-tenant handshakes to strict credit checks made finding an apartment much more difficult.
Chiarello’s figure drawing sessions later moved to United Bakery on St. Bernard. The bakery, an Italian establishment run by the Ruffino and Evola families, closed after Katrina in 2005. Post-storm, it became an art gallery and event space. She describes these sessions as the most raw she’s experienced—pregnant at the time, surrounded by the building’s wooden interiors, and facing the unfortunate foreclosure of the space for not being up to code.
Motherhood reshaped her, and she adapted. She became a part-time bartender on Bourbon Street, continued selling art, and developed her skills with oils. Between juggling two jobs and a two-year-old, she remembers destroying brushes while painting because she didn’t have time to clean them properly. Eventually, she switched to a palette knife, which saved both time and money, sparing her from constantly having to replace damaged brushes.
Around this time, she was living on Frenchmen and Claiborne. A man down the street opened his empty house to her, making it convenient to host figure drawing sessions. She could never understand how nobody lived there, frustrated that New Orleans had become a playground for those who could afford to buy property and let it sit lifelessly. Many owners didn’t reinvest in the community. Some went further, altering the culture to fit transplant standards or turning homes into vacation rentals. Meanwhile, the city’s residents had to jump through hoops just to live in their own neighborhoods.
Photo by Colby Baldwin
Over the years and through the numerous displacements, her figure drawing sessions have moved across eight different locations. I asked if there were people who had attended since the beginning. A few artists had, but George—her muse and artist friend, the one she has drawn non-stop over the years—has modeled for her since the start, and 22 years later, still shows up to her sessions. She describes him as a Dostoevsky character and, in her soul, she is one too: full of misanthropy, yet believing that compassion will save us all.
In 2004, in Pirates Alley, Chiarello would wander with a cassette player and a blank tape, recording people while acknowledging how creepy it might seem. She enjoyed how it made the world around her louder, crisper. Sometimes she eavesdropped, but she also captured cool ambient sounds, which, when amplified, became something truly fascinating.
There was a blue Postal Service mailbox. She recorded the sound of its hatch opening and closing. Though she couldn’t fully describe it, she remembers feeling like she had discovered the most beautiful sound and was eager to share it. She approached strangers, asking, “Do you want to hear the most beautiful sound in the world?” But nobody wanted to listen. She was frustrated that people were passing up small opportunities to be alive, to participate in a fleeting exchange of humanity, leaving her feeling lonely.
George was walking by—he was called “Two-Quarter George” because he would approach people asking, “Excuse me, do you have two quarters?” He came up to her one day, asking the same thing. She didn’t have any, but asked if he wanted to hear the most beautiful sound in the world. “Oh yes,” he said. She led him to the mailbox and played the recording for him.
Twenty-two years later, he still remembers the sound. The mailbox is gone, the cassette player is gone, half of the people who used to be out there are dead—but George still stands.
Chiarello reflects on the melange of people who have come to her figure drawing sessions. Most of the time, it was your average bohemian free thinker, but now and then, an occasional right-winger would join the space to draw. Usually, if something distasteful was said, the room either let it die or engaged in a conversation about how a view could be harmful. After all, this is a space where there is a naked person in the room—vulnerability is alive here.
She commented on the new-age idea of community: Our leftist spaces, where airy voices describe “community” as like-minded individuals sharing space, could look eerily similar to intolerance. Community is who is in front of you—difficult, opposing, inconvenient. The people you agree with are your friends. Community is messier than that, and still worth engaging with.
For more info, check out @namelessart2012 on Instagram.
Top photo: Over-Thinking as a Hobby (2023), oil on canvas (artworkarchive.com).
