Artist Has Budding 'Love Affair' With Beer -- Budweiser, Naturally
© St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 4,
1982
by Charlotte Grimes
If the world of art has its nuts, kooks and pranksters, it also has it geniuses.
Take Carlos Hadaway, alias the Arizona Kid.
Hadaway is a lanky, likable cuss who never meets a stranger because he calls everyone "pardner." He has a grin like a 5-year-old on Christmas morning. He loves cowboys. Heck, he lives Willie Nelson's song about cowboys as heroes.
He paints -- cowboys, mostly. He's good at it. One of his paintings hangs in the Arizona State House. He also drinks beer. Lots of beer. Budweiser. Nothing else.
What could make him a genius is the way he's managed to blend all of
those passions. The product of those passions can be seen at the VP Fair,
where the Arizona Kid is setting up his easel.
"I do beer art," said Hadaway. Specifically, he does Budweiser beer art.
Carlos Hadaway, the Arizona Kid, is doing for the Budweiser can what Andy Warhol did for Campbell's soup cans.
As a genre, beer art can best be described as paintings and poster-size prints that prominently feature beer. For his Budweiser beer art, Hadaway has put the famous red and white can and label in the hands of cowpokes, in often whimsical, sometimes poignant portraits of the West.
There's a work titled "You Ain't No Clydesdale." It features a horse -- modeled after Hadaway's horse, Rye -- trying to nip a sip over the shoulder of a disapproving cowboy. And there's "The Old Six-Shooter," a tired-out cowboy propped against a wall with a Bud in his hand and six-pack at his feet.
"Coors first came out with prints and all with its can and label," explained Hadaway. "Trouble is, I'm a Bud drinker. I just did it for me and my buddies. I got tired of going into bars and not seeing Bud beer art."
Now don't get the idea that Hadaway is a paid huckster for the folks who bring you Budweiser. "They're not paying us a cent," insisted Hadaway.
In fact, when he first wrote the Anheuser-Busch brewery for permission to use its registered trademark, he got back a simple letter that in essence said, "Sure, go ahead."
Then,
at a rodeo last winter in Scottsdale, Ariz., who should show up and buy two of
Hadaway's Budweiser prints but Mr. and Mrs. August A. Busch Jr. --
"Gussie," himself, Hadaway swears. Anyway, that's to whom
Hadaway autographed the prints.
The next thing Hadaway knows, he's getting a phone call from brewery officials. The company now has licensed him to produce the artwork and sell the prints. That license doesn't mean pay for Hadaway, but it allows him to use the logo and finish his series of six oil paintings.
Five have already been done. From them will come poster-size lithographs that sell for $10 each. Two are already printed and being marketed.
"I'm just tickled to death they licensed us -- that's wonderful of 'em," he said.
Beer art is a newcomer to Hadaway's artistic stable. Among his accomplishments are the logo of the San Diego Padres baseball team, that little priest with a halo and bat. Among those who know his work is Supreme Court Justice Sandra D. O'Connor, who presented a Hadaway painting to the state of Arizona.
But more than anything, Hadaway sees himself as a chronicler of the West. "I'm recording the last of the cowboys," he said with unaccustomed somberness.
Nowadays, Hadaway and his business partner, Bob Sperandio, spend most of their time away from their Phoenix base, traveling to small towns, rodeos and fairs to display and sell the prints of Hadaway's work. He loves what he's doing, bringing "affordable Western art to ordinary people." He feels he's also paying back some debts.
Blinded shortly after birth by cataracts, he's had six operations to restore his vision. Four were paid for by the March of Dimes and Crippled Children's Society.
"A lot of ordinary people dropped their quarters and dimes into those little cans so that I can see today," he said. His way of saying thanks is to go into the small towns where they seldom have visits from a real artist and carefully autography each purchase.
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