The Tale of a Homeless Artist

by Michael F. Brown

Published: July 11, 2009

I actually started doing drawings for a living in my senior year in high school. The teacher ran out of things to teach me, so he gave me credit to run an art business. Bitten by the entrepreneur bug after graduating high school, I went straight out to pursue art as a passion as well as a career without any more formal training. I was bored by the idea of sitting in a classroom, learning to do something that should come to you naturally and instinctively. My academic education ended after high school. I just wanted to get the hell out of there frankly, so college was out of the question for me. Plus, growing up, my mother never pushed going to college on us.

I was raised in a religious group called Jehovah’s Witnesses, until I left it for good when I was twenty-six. That’s another story, so I won’t go into the details about that religion, though it did have a profound effect on my art and still does. A lot of the images that I drew and still draw have a spiritual and sometimes overtly religious undertone to it.

After graduating from high school, I became self taught, and by experimenting with pencil, pastel and color pencils combined, I naturally found my niche. For years after graduating in 1991, I’d done countless art shows in various galleries, clubs, banks and convention centers throughout the St. Louis area. At the same time, I was working regular jobs to pay the rent and bills, creating art and selling art on the side to private art collectors and doing commissioned artwork. Finally, in April of 2004, after many frustrating years of mediocre attention and success as a part-time artist, on a friend’s suggestion I uprooted my life and moved to Kansas City, where art is generally better supported than it is in St. Louis.

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