You should totally be able to do this. 

1. Check to make sure your model is retrieving data (in the console with “skuid.$M(‘YourModelName’).data”,  or with a table.
2. Start checking properties of your chart. 

Anna recently posted a sample page that calls a Rest API and renders it as a Chart.  We showed this one off at Dreamforce. 
https://github.com/skuidify/SamplePages/blob/master/pages/Country%20Analysis%20(REST%20example)