Chuck Braud wishes he had quit his old job 10 years sooner.
Since he was a student at Denham Springs High School, Braud has kept a steady interest in drawing and painting. But until recently it was little more than a hobby, relegated to the rare spare moments left over from his demanding career as a commercial truck driver and transportation supervisor.
“(I) just felt like I was wasting a talent God gave me and had a bigger purpose than spending 50-plus hours there, when I could spend it in the studio painting,” he says.
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Around December 2021, Braud made the switch he’d been longing to make for years: a full break from that 20-year trucking career. Now, he is comfortably established as a professional sports portraitist, with his autographed paintings of the likes of LSU alums and NFL athletes Joe Burrow and Devin White selling usually somewhere in the mid-thousands—and selling well.
Making such a stark and impactful left turn couldn’t have been easy. But when asked how he felt about the decision, Braud’s answer is swift and certain:
“That (transportation) job was nothing but stress, and I haven’t had any since.”
A large portion of Braud’s workload is devoted to commissioned paintings, often from athletes—or as gifts from their loved ones—to commemorate career achievements.
He says White ordered several paintings after his Super Bowl win with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2021, while the in-home murals Braud painted of former LSU safety and current Baltimore Ravens linebacker Patrick Queen were a surprise gift from Queen’s mother.
But Braud didn’t always have the connections that today make him such a ready contact among the sporting elite. His first networking ventures were enabled by the fortuitous placement of a temporary gig in food service at LSU, which positioned him right next to a popular gathering place for the school’s athletes. Any time he saw the chance to make an introduction, he jumped on it–and he says it never even occurred to him to be intimidated.
“Only difference is bank accounts,” he says. “They’re just normal people, too.”
When he’s not working on commission, Braud’s job gets a little trickier. He’s made a practice of getting every piece autographed by the subjects depicted therein, and when they don’t come to him, he’s assiduous in tracking them down.
Braud has done three paintings depicting New Orleans-born actor Anthony Mackie, who has appeared numerous times in recent Marvel movies. For two of those pieces, Braud tracked Mackie down at a New Orleans Comic Con to get them signed.
But it’s not always so simple. He says his most challenging autograph hunt came with a series of paintings of each car to race in last year’s Indy 500. To get those signed, he spent three weeks running around the speedway, doggedly hunting down the drivers. And since he couldn’t get priority parking, he says he had to haul the large paintings four-at-a-time over long distances to even get them to the track.
The time Braud spends autograph-hunting is a drop in the bucket compared to the hours he puts into his paintings. Depending on size and complexity, he devotes anywhere from seven to 30 hours on a piece. His most ambitious project was a painting of the late, iconic Kobe Bryant cradling an NBA championship trophy in his custom Jeff Hamilton logo jacket. For that one, he says he “stopped counting at 50.”
“I was wanting to paint (Kobe) for a while,” he says, “just because of all the details on the jacket and stuff. It was a good challenge, it was fun.”
But in contrast to his exhausting career in the transportation business, Braud says his new line of work hardly feels like a hustle. chuckbraud.com
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This article was originally published in the 2023 Tiger Pride issue of 225 magazine.