Charlie Hunter and William Hays

Making It In The Arts:

Charlie Hunter and William Hays

by Joyce Marcel

You’ve got to hustle to “make it” in the arts in Vermont.

Creative people here learn to apply creativity to their survival as well as to their art. Take painter Charlie Hunter of Bellows Falls, a tall and rangy redhead with a degree in art from Yale and another one in irreverence that he got from life.

Hunter can get so much pain and love into his starkly beautiful images of decaying barns and houses that folks just have to pay good money to hang them on their walls. He’s madly in love with what he calls New England’s “rotting American infrastructure,” as well as train travel and roots-Americana music, or what some people call folk. And Hunter believes in doing exactly what he loves and
making money out of all of it. This New Englander’s main goal in life is to turn people on.

Besides painting, Hunter has managed the
careers of well-known folk artists like Dar Williams and Fred Eaglesmith, done at least 40 album covers and started a successful Bellows Falls roots music festival built around Eaglesmith called Roots on the River. When Hunter got tired of it, he turned it over to a friend to manage and move on. But the festival continues. This year, from June 7 to 10th, will be its 13th year.
(rootsontheriver.com)

When Tropical Storm Irene took down the Bartonsville Bridge, Hunter was right on it, creating a poster to raise money for a new bridge. Now he organizes en plein aire (French for “in the open”) painting classes and folk trains.

What are folk trains? Hunter’s company, Roots on the Rails (flyingunderradar.com), hires the rails, the trains that go on them and the musicians. He puts them all together and then sells tickets to the fans.

In April, Hunter took about 80 people from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon in the fast company of Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, among others. The trip sold out. Just before they left the station, he posted this on Facebook: “Just tallying up the trip totals of our patrons (and a couple of musicians) for the upcoming Portland Trip. Nineteen folks will be on their first trip, 30 will be on something other than their first, 4 on their 3rd, 8 on their 4th, 5 on their 5th, 3 each on their 7th, 8th and 9th, and then one each on their 10, 11, 12 and 13th trips!”

If nothing else, the train rides are how the hustling Hunter gets to take a vacation every now and then.

“Everything I do makes perfect sense and there’s no great philosophical depth behind it,” Hunter said. “It’s just that I don’t know how to do anything else, really. My dad was a printer. He ran a little one-man print shop up in Weathersfield called the Hunter Press. So I’ve always done drawings, because that was always highly encouraged and there was a huge amount of paper and drawing materials around the house. Music, I just fell into loving it. I had older brothers and sisters would sing me Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songs to put me to sleep. Murder ballads were very big. And when I was 12, I was already a travel agent. I used to run this thing called Trains International that would put together anybody’s train trip. I always loved trains.”

It’s about doing what you love.

Hunter’s studio is in Bellows Falls. His work sells mainly in galleries; through June, he will have a show at Vermont Artisan Designs in Brattleboro.

Or take William H. Hays of Brattleboro, whose super-realistic nature paintings are gaspingly lovely. Hays calls himself “a shameless promoter,” and that’s exactly right. He and his wife, Patricia Long, have lived in Brattleboro for over 20 years. They own the Artist’s Loft on Main Street, which serves them as a gallery, a home, a studio and a small, income-producing B&B. They had a hand in founding the successful and lively Gallery Walk on the first Friday of every month, as well as the now-defunct Windham Art Gallery. They also live part of the time in Nova Scotia.

“Nobody can make a career of art in Brattleboro,” Hays said. “You can count the number of people who make 100 percent of their income in art in Brattleboro on one hand and have fingers left over. Sorry.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t make art and enjoy small town Vermont life. It just means that there’s no marketplace, no gallery culture, no place where you can sell your work. To earn a living, you have to a) peddle your wares elsewhere and b) do other things for income — running a B&B, catering, working at the food co-op or building houses. In fact, there’s a famous bumper sticker you can see riding around the state that says, “Moonlight in Vermont — or else.”

“I recognize that there are times when I am not able to make a living as an artist,” Hays said. “Figuring out a balance between making money and making art is a good thing. I’ve had periods where I just worked to make money and periods where I just worked to make art. But I realized if I’m going to sell the art, that’s a business. The business of art is business.”

Even after being a painter for 30 years, Hays is willing to change in order to capture business.

“I’ve decided to redirect my emphasis and career from painting to printmaking after almost three years of watching the popularity of the linocut prints increase constantly,” Hays said. “At the beginning of March I decided to commit to building a new business from the work I’ve done in printmaking. In the past five weeks I’ve been very fortunate to add nine new galleries in the region to those carrying my work. Of course, this has involved a great deal of thought, planning, labor, travel, expenses, etc. I’m happy to say that I’m so far ahead of my projected goals that I’m going to have to
remake those goals. There are worse problems.”

The lesson he takes from this experience is to pay attention to what is going on around you and what is going on with your work in the eyes of others and in the marketplace.

“I’ve been very fortunate to not have to create my artwork according to what people demand,” Hays said. “But I’m hardly independent of such currents. Observing and evaluating what is working and what is not has taken me in a new direction. But it has taken me several years to convince myself that this is the proper thing to do.”

Hays says he devotes two-thirds of his time to marketing.

“It’s not necessarily pleasant, but it’s absolutely necessary,” he said. “And I promise, if you’re waiting for someone to represent you or be your business manager, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

Although he shows his work in his own Brattleboro studio and in Nova Scotia, Hays also shows in galleries. Choosing the right ones is essential.

“Style is important for galleries,” Hays said. “Identify the galleries that will show your work intelligently. I am a realistic, representational painter of nature, so galleries that sell abstract art won’t work for me.”

Art is just canvas and paint until somebody pays for it, Hays said.

“But if I can create something that’s so beautiful that people can’t throw it away, I have succeeded,” Hays said. “The world has enough ugliness and strife and sadness. There isn’t anything aside from love that is more valuable than beauty.”