Renowned Playboy artist Phillip Renaud to be memorialized Sept. 10

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Obituary - Phillip Renaud, respected Chicago artist-illustrator whose fans included Art Paul, the man who created the Playboy logo, at a 2004 showing of his work for the U.S. Air Force in Washington, D.C. Archived on Friday, September 2, 2011. | Supplied photo

Updated: November 16, 2011 1:27AM

There aren’t too many artists around who’ve made a wake-up call to Jimmy Stewart; watched Marilyn Monroe blow her lines as Robert Mitchum sought comfort in whiskey; illustrated articles in Playboy by some of the world’s finest writers in the magazine’s Chicago heyday; taught students who went on to acclaim, and had work hung in the Pentagon.

Phillip Renaud, a dapper Canadian-born Chicagoan who sprinkled his conversations with “the devil you say” and threw merry parties when his night-blooming cereus plant flowered roughly once a year, will be memorialized Sept. 10. He was 77 when he died in June from liver cancer at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

Mr. Renaud grew up in Edmonton in the province of Alberta, and his creativity was evident early on. To evade his parents’ curfew, he put on a cape, covered up his face and cavorted outside with the neighbor kids. “He used to run around and they wouldn’t know who he was,” said his son, Bret Renaud.

Phillip Renaud’s father had a trading post near Edmonton in Slave Lake, then a trapping-and-hunting town named for an aboriginal group called the Slavees. His dad traded furs and other items with Native Americans and anyone passing through.

Alberta is the gateway to the Canadian Rockies and the site of the Banff Springs Hotel, the castle-like resort that looms over Bow Falls, where Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum were swept away in the 1954 movie “River of No Return.” An 18-year-old Phillip landed a job at the hotel and was able to watch some of the filming. It was like watching sausage being made.

“Mitchum would get his lines perfect every time,” Bret Renaud said, “and Marilyn Monroe kept messing them up. He’d [Mitchum] go back and do a shot of whiskey and come back and do his lines perfectly. This went on like 10 times, and each time he came back and got his lines perfect.”

On top of that, Mitchum began dating the teenager’s girlfriend, Bret Renaud said.

Another time, Phillip Renaud had to make a wake-up call to movie star Jimmy Stewart, who said “uh-huh, yes, all right, uh, yes, all right” in his charmingly halting delivery.

Mr. Renaud studied at Chicago’s Academy of Fine Arts and graduated cum laude from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. At the academy, he met Carol Cooper, who became a WGN-TV courtroom sketch artist. They were married 54 years and raised their sons Bret and Peter in the Ravenswood Manor neighborhood on the North Side.

Mr. Renaud started working for Playboy in the swinging ’60s, back when it had a global circulation of about 7 million — nearly five times what it is today. He was hired by Art Paul, who designed one of the world’s most iconic, enduring logos — Playboy’s bunny-in-a-tux. Soon Mr. Renaud was illustrating articles by Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal.

“He did wonderful pieces of art for Playboy,” Paul said. His depictions were “a very engaging kind of thing — you couldn’t go by it. You’d have to look at it again.’’

Mr. Renaud’s illustrations were featured in traveling exhibits of Playboy art, alongside works by Dali and Warhol, Paul said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Renaud’s drawings were often used in — or on — Scott Foresman textbooks. As schoolboys, “The first thing we did when we got a book,” Bret said, “was look in the credits and see if my dad’s illustrations were in there — and half the time, they were. Peter had a book where he did a cover.”

Mr. Renaud was a 30-year member of the U.S. Air Force Art Program, which has a long tradition of hiring artists to record daily life. He traveled with the Air Force to Singapore, Thailand and Europe. Nearly 20 of his paintings have been displayed at the Pentagon and other Air Force sites, Bret Renaud said.

He taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts; the Illinois Institute of Art, and Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts. He could demonstrate how to capture nature with virtuoso brush strokes, or how to mimic the fleshy style of Rubens, or the torsion (twisting) in the works of Michelangelo. He told students to loosen up, have fun, and trust their talent.

With his 1966 Jaguar, an appreciation for 12-year-old Scotch and an innate elegance, “He was the kind of guy you’d expect to step out of a cocktail party in a James Bond movie,” said Scott Gustafson, a former Renaud student whose illustrations of fairy tales and fantasy made a fan out of singer Michael Jackson.

“He never seemed to walk — he strolled into a room,” said artist Gary Gianni, another former student. And no matter how old he got, he had a curiosity and joie de vivre that made it seem “he was perpetually about 45 years old.”

Mr. Renaud painted in an attic studio filled with light, plants, a couple of cats and a bathtub with 10 big goldfish swimming around — he took them in every winter.

His memorial was delayed to await the availability of the Palette & Chisel for an exhibit of his art. The memorial and opening of the exhibit will be from 5 to 10 p.m. Sept. 10 at the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, 1012 N. Dearborn. Remarks are at 7 p.m. The exhibit will continue until Sept. 20.