Longtime Memphis artist Danny Broadway talked about his mixed media painting, “Playing for Tips,” which was unveiled February 27th at Roadshow BMW. His painting is the poster artwork for the 2023 Memphis in May Beale Street Music Festival, which will be held May 5th through 7th in Tom Lee Park.
Broadway, whose work has appeared nationally at art galleries and venues, has an MFA from the Watkins College of Art at Belmont University and a fine arts degree from the University of Memphis.
“The first thing is I wanted something that was representative of Memphis music,” Broadway says. “And I just kind of put it together from looking at a lot of photographs I had taken at a lot of different events I have been going to over the last few years. Just live music acts. I’d always seen these musicians and taken pictures of them not really knowing what to do with them. Just to have a portfolio of images to pull from.”
Broadway went back to his portfolio when it came time to do the painting. “When this opportunity came up, I started looking for pictures of people that had a lot of good personality and good character. I just kind of put them all together in my own composition and added features to them that I felt were current, more modern, more representative of a lot of varieties of people around town and people in general.”
Viewers might recognize some of those people. “For instance, one of the horn players has color in his hair. His hair was kind of modeled after Ja Morant. And then the lady with the microphone, I pulled her hair and her glasses from Gangsta Boo, who passed away recently.”
The woman with the microphone is carrying a heart. “The heart in her hand, I was thinking about Lisa Marie Presley and how the city loves Elvis.”
Other people in the painting include “the Kirk Whalums and the jazz and the popular people who stand out as Memphis icons.”
He put “a lot of their features” into people in the painting. “And made my own people out of them.”
Broadway follows in the footsteps of the late George Hunt, a long-time Beale Street Music Festival poster artist. “I didn’t copy his style, so to speak, but I did borrow some of his form. Where he pictures these musicians in a room and there’s a lot of character surrounding them — whether it’s the way they’re positioned or the way they’re distorted some kind of way. His style and my style are two different things, but I did borrow from his formatting.”
Hunt was one of his mentors, Broadway says. “When I first started showing my work here in Memphis it was at a gallery on Beale Street. George was the signature artist in that gallery. The Willis Gallery on Beale Street. And Willis Drinkard was the owner of the gallery.”
Broadway, Hunt and twin artists Terry and Jerry Lynn bounced ideas off of each other in those days. “We were younger than him and we all looked up to him. We did some traveling with him. I remember going to Florida with him. He invited us to come and do a show with him.”
Hunt would talk to them about what he was trying to do in his paintings. “He would talk to us and give us advice. He was just a good mentor. We would watch him and see what he was doing. And we learned so much from him.”
It’s an honor for him to have done the poster artwork, Broadway says. “I was honored they would even think to ask me. He has such a following for the posters and people just love them so much.”
Broadway was honored, but he was also nervous. “Because there was such a high expectation. People were used to seeing it done one way and I didn’t want to disappoint.
“It took me a long time to figure out how I wanted to create it and what I wanted to put it out there. I didn’t want it to be a George Hunt painting. I wanted it to be a Danny Broadway painting. But at the same time I didn’t want to go too extreme or too far off for them to be disappointed. That was the big challenge.”
He was a bit too influenced by Hunt when he began the painting. “At first it was lot more like what he was doing. But I never felt it was mine. I pulled all that back and started from scratch and worked on it like I would my own work.”
Hunt had his own style. “Like the people he paints. They don’t really look like people. They have distorted features. That distortion was a big part of his style. I don’t do that kind of dramatic distortion that he does, but at the same time I kind of distorted some of the poses and the figures I did just to kind of honor what he had been doing.”
Broadway gave another nod to Hunt in the painting. “He used a lot of text in his work. And I remember him telling me how he learned text and what kind of composition that adds to his work. So, I put in a little tip bucket at the bottom with the word ‘TIP’ on it. That was kind of a throwback thing to George.”
A third unveiling was held at the Roadshow BMW event in addition to the ones for the painting and the poster.
Images of his painting were on the hood, the back, and the sides of a new black BMW in the showroom.
That BMW was a surprise, Broadway says. “I thought it was pretty cool,” he says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Ricky Peacock, account manager with Genesco Sports Enterprises, which is based in Dallas, explained how Broadway’s artwork appeared on the car. “We (digitally) reformatted the original artwork to align with the body style of a 2022 BMW X3,” he says. “It’s going to be on display at Roadshow BMW up until the festival. And then it will be on display at the music festival.”
And, Peacock adds, “A QR code is on the car as well. Now through April 20th if people want to come in and see the car, they can also scan that QR and register for a chance to win two tickets to all three days at the music festival.”
Roadshow BMW is at 405 North Germantown Parkway in Cordova, Tennessee.
No, Broadway doesn’t get to keep the Beamer. But he has another idea: “Maybe let me drive it for a little while,” he says with a laugh.
