Welcome to the web home of crazy artist and illustrator-designer “The Roadside Artist.”
There are millions of people who try to make a living from art. Art Stars are few and far between, and many of them seem a bit ..oh, I don’t know, artificial (to put it nicely). But I am NOT a star; I am a working-class artist…
I make some sort of living from creating beautiful paintings of Oregon scenery along with doing book illustrations, layout & design, plus caricatures and cartoons - for individuals and for Cartoon and word art t-shirts. Oh, and I sell a few Oregon scenic fine art posters and framed Oregon fine art prints, too.
For various reasons, art is what I need to do with my life right now. It is most definitely not a get rich quick scheme. But that has been true of almost everyone we revere today: In their time, they were NOTHING. If you can get past the fact that art doesn’t really pay very well and that nobody values the artist, one can always say that it beats working for a living. If you can handle it…
This is something I’ve come to accept in recent years. I had higher hopes and expectations when I was younger, but now I know it won’t happen. I can’t really work at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, though, so I’m stuck at the low end of commercial art - along with about twenty million other people.
Sure, there are a few LIVE art superstars around who make a good living through their art. There are two general types who become “big” while they are alive:
The first type uses what I lovingly call the “BRASS BALLS” approach to art. This involves things like putting a single dot on a canvas and titling it “The Triumph of Christ” or painting a red square in the middle of a canvas and calling it “A Dozen Roses.” I suppose this approach could also be called “The Emperor’s New Clothes” school of art. You go out of your way to do stuff that doesn’t make any sense, brazenly call it something inscrutable, and dare anyone to contradict you. “If you can’t understand what it is, it must be art.”
The second type could either be called Super Salesman Marketers, or scam artists, depending on your point of view. Less than a a dozen people fall into this category. Basically, they have at least SOME talent for painting but they have an even bigger talent marketing. They combine obsessive controlling drive to achieve with the ethics of a used car salesman. People such as Thomas Kinkade use a marketing machine and brute-force sales to sell art like laundry soap. Ethics and traditional concepts definitely get in the way of art stardom.
For a while, I had a really good run selling impressionist paintings of Oregon -and I love to do them! But then the bottom fell out of the market so I started doing cartooning (something I started as a child) and caricature sketches. A strange change of course, perhaps, but if you can’t throw everything out the window and start over in a new direction, what good is life? Nothing is ever permanent. That’s blue collar…that’s working class.
It seems like I’ve all but given up painting because it’s expensive compared to the selling price, and paintings and the storage costs between creation and sales gets out of hand. My main revenue still comes from layout and design work for books and magazines, but that is one of those dying arts that seems doomed at any moment.
Yet, it doesn’t take a lot for me to be happy. While my paintings of Oregon are pretty good, I’m less than stellar as a portrait/caricature artist - but I charge a lot less than the “good” guys and I will get better with time. It’s like learning any new trade. And that, too, is part of the reality of being a working-class artist. I’ll even paint a sign or two if you like. It won’t be the best ever done, but the price will be right ..and more than fair.
Bio
Native of Oregon, I grew up in a troubled family and we were often homeless, living in a car. I spent the next several decades looking for something that was more than just a paycheck…more than mere survival.
Now it may be true that I am really just a computer monkey that fancies itself to be an artist: Today my primary income is derived from doing graphical layout work for magazines and books. In the past I’ve been a newspaper columnist, a commercial fishing boat captain, a police officer, a pastor, a long-haul truck driver, a real estate appraiser and a computer network administrator - Yes, I’ve had a varied and wonderful life, for which I am grateful.
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I can do caricatures, cartoons and pencil portraits to order, by e-mail and I can do bigger jobs “on-site” on the North Oregon coast. Just drop me a line if you can find something for me to do… Thank you for supporting the arts.
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C. L. Haight
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