Moving Into Light: Artist Carlos Hadaway

Each life of inspiration seems to follow a broad general pattern: the hero is offered a challenge to overcome--poverty, perhaps, or some physical condition that would simply accept and thereby subside into a life of automatic defeat. The hero becomes a study in Western Artist Carlos Hadaway, copyright Nancy Hadaway opposites, as challenge becomes opportunity, hardship becomes accomplishment.

Like most of us, artist Carlos Hadaway was born into light. By the time he was 10 years old, however, he was forced back into the darkness. The cataracts with which he was born brought blindness.

Gradually, though, over a period of five years, he was reborn into the world of light, as a series of six operations restored his sight. Finding vision more precious than his young peers who took it for granted, he moved into an artistic medium where he could playfully express the joy of seeing. Still in his teens, he became an editorial cartoonist for a San Diego newspaper, creating a character that later became the first mascot--a little friar with halo and bat--for the San Diego Padres.

After high school in the late 1950s, he joined the Navy--no small feat, considering his continuing visual challenges. It was there he made friends with a number of shipmates who were cowboys from Arizona. Following his stint as a seafarer, he joined them and became a cowboy himself, riding the range, working brandings and roundups and performing the less romantic chores of cowboying--and breaking more than a few bones in the process. As he learned the rugged western lifestyle and the serenity of wide open vistas on ranches between Flagstaff and Prescott, Hadaway combined what became the great love of his life--cowboying--with his art, and began painting western scenes in oils.

Among Hadaway's most striking paintings are sweeping vistas of the west, painted with rare lighting that lets the viewer feel his joy of seeing. Like Hadaway himself, the blind boy who became a visual artist, these paintings are vividly captured studies in opposites. Dark stormy skies frame red-gold castles of sandstone, brilliantly lit by the desert sun. A distant crag of barren rock is surrounded by the heroic greens of desert plant life. A glowing sunset sky casts warmth on the rim of the Grand Canyon even as a winter storm moves in.

Today, his luminous western landscapes and imaginative portrayals of mountain men, cowboys and Native Americans, drawn both from his buckaroo experience and from the western legend, have brought him a measure of fame in the field. Among other honors, he has a painting hanging in the Arizona State Capitol, and he received the 1979 George Phippen Award for western art.

Hadaway brings to mind another western icon and study in opposites, Teddy Roosevelt, who overcame similar visual challenges to become legendary for taking big bites of life. Even as he pursues the quieter, more solitary toil of creating timeless western images on canvas, Hadaway continues his lively life as a buckaroo. Affectionately known to his friends as the "Arizona Kid," Hadaway stays close to the western heritage by working cattle with friends on local ranches, adding his glowing energy and good humor--and singular vision--to everything he touches.

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