He was examining a Monet from kissing distance one day when a lady tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he could step aside. She had a class of kids in tow. Hardwick listened as the teacher talked about the colors, the paint, the technique. "And did you kids know," Hardwick remembered her saying, "that this painter Claude Monet, he had really bad eyesight? He was almost blind!" The kids left, and Hardwick walked up to the muddled lily pads again. He had had no idea that Monet was blind. He couldn't read the placard.
It was another message from the universe. "I just thought, 'Yeah, I can do this,'" he said. "It just woke me up."
Mandy Oaklander
Charlie Hardwick's vivid concert posters drew music lovers to his booth at Houston's prestigious Bayou City Arts Festival.
Mandy Oaklander
Now 42, Hardwick has designed posters for some of the world's most famous bands, including his childhood heroes The Who.
Details
Related Content
More About
Within a couple weeks, Hardwick's life did a symmetrical flip. He designed a cover for the Houston Press — a bold, comic-style boy flipping the bird. "It was the most complained about cover ever," he said. "That's big." Uncle Charlie was back.
_____________________
Around the corner from Tacos a Go-Go is a cozy, funky vinyl shop called Sig's Lagoon. Tiki mugs, bobble heads, and unclassified kitsch fill the gaps between racks and racks of records. It's a nursery for weird local punk.
The owner, Tomas Escalante, wanted Uncle Charlie on his walls. Hardwick had designed an album cover for Escalante's band a long time ago, and the style would fit perfectly with the store, he thought. "He's definitely on that low-brow kind of approach," Escalante said. So he asked Hardwick if he would do a poster show at the store. Hardwick agreed, though he expected a tiny turnout. True to their DIY roots, they taped color-bombed posters on slices of cardboard and hung them on the walls. The Chronicle heralded Hardwick and the show with a big write up, and Hardwick prepared for a handful of friends. More than 200 people came.
He'd hardly been laid off a month.
Even after the crowds had gone home, Escalante continued to make a lot of Uncle Charlie sales. The two turned Sig's Lagoon into Hardwick's distribution center. Now, the store is confettied with Uncle Charlie skate decks, magnets, posters, greeting cards, and T-shirts. "Everything in his art just pops," Escalante said. "That's the one comment I get a lot from people — it jumps out."
Hardwick's good fortune was only beginning. A couple of months after the Sig's Lagoon show, the House of Blues in Houston was about to open. They needed posters for the giant marquees outside, and Hardwick got the gig. Now, he scours the list of coming attractions and chooses which bands' posters he wants to design. "Little did I know, it was going to turn into this gravy train," he said. "There's so much shit to do!"
So he formed a company called Chazbro — another of his nicknames from the Dresden 45 days — and recruited a couple of graphic designers to create posters. One of those is Scrojo out of San Diego, a longtime Uncle Charlie fan who creates one or two posters a month for Chazbro. He said he loves telling people that he works for a blind poster designer. "It's so surreal that a blind man is a functioning graphic artist," he said. "I'm completely amazed the guy can still do it."
But to Frank Kozik, the artistic process has very little to do with eyesight. "I know the way I work and with a lot of guys, you don't really have to see it to imagine it in your mind," he said. "I think he'll be able to do whatever he envisions."
_____________________
There are no cars in the Hardwicks' musty garage — only a fleet of kamikaze bikes and racks of Hardwick's posters. A pyramid of cylindrical tubes waits to be picked apart and shipped to Australia, Ohio, Colorado, and Katy, Texas. Until Hardwick moves into the office loft above Sig's Lagoon next year, this is Chazbro headquarters.
These days, Uncle Charlie's work is more thickly lined and less detailed, though it's more vibrant, like op art on drugs. And lately, Uncle Charlie has been stripping band names from his off-the-clock works. In his new series called "What I See", a mixture of painting, posters, and computer-generated images, Hardwick places a small character from one of his old posters in the center of a canvas. A thin halo of pattern surrounds the subject. Lively multicolored strokes fill the corners and edges of the canvas and rush forward, closing in on the subject. Hardwick can't see anything but the character right in the center.
"What I See" isn't going to change. Three years ago, Hardwick's ophthalmologist wrote him a short open letter for anyone who may come asking. "Charlie Hardwick is legally blind due to optic nerve atrophy and will remain that way," it read. "His vision will not improve."
But to many, his art has. Ignoring his natural urges toward stencils, precision, and the typographical cleanness drilled into him by his career at CMA, Hardwick got angry one day recently and painted something freehand. He used wild, exuberant strokes to paint a smiling adolescent boy with one eye closed — the right eye, the one out of which Hardwick has lost almost all vision. Within days, a woman wanted to buy it to hang on the wall of her new kids' store.
Stephanie will hate to see the boy go. Since her husband's vision has gotten worse, she says, his art has only gotten better. "It used to be just 'Fuck you'," she says, "but now it's 'Fuck you, I'm happy.'"
