Meet Benjamin Hummel | Chalk Artist, Author, Illustrator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Benjamin Hummel and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Benjamin, how has your work-life balance changed over time?
Balance as a whole makes us better human beings, give us proper perspective, helps maintain better health. Like all ambitious youth, when I was younger, I wanted to be full throttle all of the time. The interesting thing about me, however, is that I already was dealing with a compromised body, due to my highly aggressive auto-immune disorder that I have had since birth. Up until I was fifteen, though my mind wanted to do all the things a teenager normally does, I was extremely sick, sidelined, and often in the hospital.

At fifteen, I received a liver transplant, and for the next seven years, I exploded with potential. I could not be slowed down. I tried to fit everything into my life, from tennis to art to the outdoors, and more. But the one thing I didn’t do was schedule rest. However, after overextending myself in my senior year of college, I crashed hard. I ended up in the ICU for a month. My disease had come back and my heavy living only exasperated it. I remember taking a very hard evaluation of my life and I realized that I did not want to spend the rest of my life living like this. I also came to the realization that in order to have balance, we must let go of some things. Sometimes, we must let go of a lot of things. And sometimes we have to let go of things we think we love: hobbies, interests, etc.

Balance can be difficult for many people for that reason. We tend to want to hang on to things way longer than we need to. We need to prioritize what is ultimately most important for us right now, in the moment. We need to pick a singular goal and focus for our career and balance our lives around that. Balance needs to include time devoted to family and friends. Attention to rest and health for ourselves also needs to be up there.

I feel I’m lucky. My disease reminds me constantly that I need balance. I kind of don’t really get a choice. I’m also quite aware that I wasn’t supposed to live this long. I’m living as a result of somebody else’s ultimate donation. It’s very forefront in my mind, which helps me prioritize my life with a lot more urgency.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I always imagined myself as being some sort of sophisticated high end fine artist, but no. If you ask anybody about the art of Benjamin Hummel, they’ll most likely say I’m that chalk artist guy.

Certainly, that’s really where I was able to focus my career. Up until this point, I was all over the place as a freelance illustrator, doing stuff for children’s books, newspaper cartoons, technical drawings for catalogs, and fine art illustration done in the style of the Golden Age of American Illustration. I struggled to gain traction because nobody could pinpoint exactly what my look was.

All during this time, I was experimenting with chalk art, showing up for local festivals and occasionally winning awards. As the 3D chalk art movement was just in its infancy in the early 2000s, I decided to try it out. I just so happen to be a master of perspective. I currently teach perspective at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Knowing that anamorphic or “forced” perspective simply required an advance understanding of perspective, I took what I knew about traditional perspective and taught myself the secrets (there were no books on the subject back then, and YouTube didn’t really exist).

One day, I get a call out of the blue from an agent looking for a chalk artist. On that day, and that day only, when she typed the phrase “award winning Denver area chalk artist” in Google, my name was first in the results. This has never happened since, but on that day, it was destiny. From that point on, I went from being a volunteer chalk artist to a paid one, getting gigs all over the world, working 10-12 gigs a summer. The year was 2012.

Maintaining my brand and my style as a chalk artist for some reason came a whole lot easier than all other aspects of my art career. On one of our first jobs, I hired my aunt to help out on a giant piece in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As we walked from the hotel to the venue, we kept calling ourselves “The People of the Chalk.” When we returned home and discovered nobody had the domain, we secured it, made tee-shirts, and have been “The People of the Chalk” ever since.

However, I still have this disease. It still sits lurking in the background. Because my work as a chalk artist is a performance art, I must be there and perform, regardless. The show must go on. In the past, I worked on a piece while dealing with 104 degree fever. Once, I worked on a job only after one day from being released from the hospital. One summer, they placed a biliary drainage tube in my side. I did two, back-to-back chalk art gigs in one week, while wearing that tube. The audience did not know the difference. I gave them a show.

It is because my health is so unpredictable that I always bring along two additional people to each job I do. My wife is one, and then I always hire another artist. I love giving other artists work, and am grateful they can come and help out. I come up with the vision, preplan the design, reverse engineer the perspective required, create schematics for all of them to follow, and they help me make it happen. And honestly, the preplanning part is my favorite part. I love the inventive aspect of coming up with these designs.

This past year, I finally had to hang up the chalks for good. My health is now to the point where I just cannot do it like I once did. I might do one here and there for very special occasions, but I have shifted my focus back to my more subdued studio illustration. I feel like my time doing chalk art allowed me to better focus my traditional illustration as well. I now only have two looks/styles. One is a pen and ink style that I have completely mastered and made my own. I will sometimes add pencil or digital color to these drawings. The second is a stylized, slightly cartoonized look that I execute with acrylic paints and colored pencil that I use for a lot of my children’s books.

And speaking of books, I started working on another love of mine, and that is writing. I just finished publishing a young adult time travel adventure fiction book that I took the luxury to fully illustrate in that pen and ink style previously mentioned. This is a project that I am very proud of right now. We just released it, but so far, people are responding well to it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Without a doubt, I would go up into the mountains, somewhere in nature. As much as I enjoy city life, I love nature even more. My health makes camping very difficult, but we might find a nice Air B&B somewhere beautiful like Pagosa Springs. We would spend a few days exploring the nearby trails. If this friend were also an artist, we would pack our paints and do some landscape painting on location on one or two of the days. And at the end, we would of course take time to enjoy the hot springs. I love breakfast and coffee shops, so early mornings we would be up at the crack of dawn, checking out the local bakeries and cafes.

If our trip was shorter and we were staying in town, we would drive up to Netherland. There’s a great Nepalese restaurant up there that I never miss every time we are around. The town has a few quirky things to appreciate, but the trails around that area and up into Caribou are just simply gorgeous.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
So many people have supported me on my journey. So many people have walked alongside during my darkest days, I cannot possibly list them all. However, two have continually shared my health burden with me, step by step.

First, my wife. She has been completely supportive of my crazy goals and dreams, helping me succeed. She is an equal, if not better, artist in her own right, but she doesn’t mind taking the backseat and letting me shine. And I cannot say enough about the role she has had to play as caregiver as I battle this disease.

Second, is my mother. I like to joke that when I told her I wanted to be an artist, she did the unfortunate thing and encouraged me to go for it.

Website: www.hummelillustration.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hummelillustration

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paintingforlife/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/paintingforlife

Other: www.peopleofthechalk.com www.instagram.com/peopleofthechalk