He’s Top Drawer Painter Mixes Skill, Love Of The Sport To Capture Hockey Scenes For Chiefs

Everybody has a team dentist.

The team doctor is universal.

A team optometrist is not unusual and the education coordinator can stay pretty busy on any junior hockey club.

Not many if any have a team artist.

The Spokane Chiefs have one - Charlie Palmer - whose work is fine art but whose hobby is jock art, specifically hockey art.

“I don’t know if anybody in sports has anybody quite like him - a professional painter,” Chiefs owner Bobby Brett said. “When you see the quality of work he’s produced, he’s unique.”

Palmer - the official, unpaid team artist of the Spokane Chiefs - paints for privileges.

Buddying up to the franchise - and eventually putting on a show where his hockey art would go up for sale - are inviting rewards to a hockey nut.

So now, more than just a season ticket holder, he’s an insider who plays in the Brett Sports company golf tournament, comes and goes in the Chiefs offices and has even begun to skate again.

“I get to hang around,” the fiftyish Palmer said.

His living comes from painting serious landscapes, which are presented in Northwest galleries - and routinely bashed by Brett.

” ‘Stick paintings,’ Bobby calls them,” Palmer says with a long laugh as he sifts through the clutter of the converted barn that serves him well. It’s a studio, tool shed and TV room.

“Bobby asks why I waste time painting sticks?”

The work is lonely and exacting. Capturing a hockey player on canvas is a different kind of expression.

“I’m doing the Chiefs art, a lot of it, for fun,” Palmer said. “Do you know how incredibly boring it can be to paint trees and bushes year after year?”

He did the cover for the Chiefs program. The cover for the season ticket package is his. He put Chiefs right wing Jay Bertsch on canvas, sparking a letter from ex-Chiefs captain Bryan McCabe of the New York Islanders, asking Palmer to paint him.

He got his foot in the door with the Bertsch painting.

“It was Bertsch and a Tacoma Rocket in front of the boards,” Palmer said. “I liked the color combinations that were going on - two different oranges, the ESPN sign, Bertsch in the red and white, the black and green with the Rockets.

“I thought, why not show it to them? It was an example of what I was capable of.”

Since then he’s done Chiefs goaltender David Lemanowicz and winger Greg Leeb. Dmitri Leonov and Hugh Hamilton are together in another scene. John Cirjak, Sean Gillam and Leeb are pictured in yet another grouping.

The style has LeRoy Neiman painted all over it (“He’s an influence, of course,” Palmer says). The paintings convey speed, with a loose brush work that produces a flashy look.”With this kind of handling maybe they’ll start calling me LeRoy. Neiman started out as a cartoonist for Playboy, you know. I started out as a cartoonist for The Review.”

Painting for the hockey club puts him in touch with deadlines. Oils dry too slowly. Palmer turned to gouache - opaque water color - but settled on acrylics “because they’re a little more intense and a little faster to work with.”

The inspiration is his own but his models are photographs, some clipped out of the newspaper.

He’s acquired an appreciation for the action shot.

“The work I’ve done is from photos, for accuracy of form,” he said. “I’ve been issued a Western Hockey League photo pass because they don’t allow private cameras in the arena.”

Photographers shoot from the penalty box which isn’t as easy as it looks, Palmer says.

“It was scary the first time in there, with pucks and sticks and skates,” he said. “One guy got his skate up on the railing and cut the railing in front of me in the penalty box. I’m erring on the side of getting out of the way, rather than getting the good shot.”

The artist knows the game, though, enough to indulge a dream.

“I’ve had this hockey fantasy,” Palmer said. “I’ve always wanted to go out on the ice with a stick and puck and ring one off the post or the crossbar. I actually got to do that.

“I’m an avid fan, not just a fan,” added Palmer, a native New Englander who attended Boston University and grew up following the Boston Bruins. “I got hockey cards, hockey sticks, my own stakes, a couple of Rangers jerseys.

“Who knows, maybe I’ll look for a rec league. Skating helps me get a feel of the rink and the boards and the net, and the interplay of the figures. It’s a total three-dimensional thing happening that you’re trying to get on a piece of paper.”

Brett visited Palmer’s studio adjacent to his rustic rural home and came away impressed.

“His livelihood is in those landscapes,” the Chiefs owner said, “but his love is the game of hockey.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo