Christopher Turner knew his career path of driving eighteen wheelers was not his final destination.
“I’ve been drawing probably since I was like 3 or 4 [years-old],” Turner said. “I used to draw Mickey Mouse and characters of that nature.”
Now owner of Art By Christopher Turner, Turner walked a long road before owning his own business.
Christopher’s mother enrolled him in the Gifted and Talented Arts Program in the East Baton Rouge School System. He said he painted throughout grade school and received a partial scholarship to the Art Institute of Dallas but couldn’t accept it. He instead opted to take care of his grandmother, who was sick with cancer in Baton Rouge.
After his grandmother died, Christopher went the route of becoming a truck driver, the same work his father did. Between the time of his grandmother’s death and his new job, Christopher wasn’t drawing or painting at all.
But he never let art slip too far away, checking out the art scene in each city he would stop in. It wasn’t until Christopher met and married his wife that he realized what he was missing.
“I met my wife around 2007,” Christopher said. “Just through conversation I told her I had this passion for art, but I hadn’t done it in a while. We got engaged around a year later, and as a gift, she bought me a canvas and paint.”
With a little push from his wife, Turner’s dream of becoming a professional artist came to fruition.
He and his wife, Ashley Turner, now own and operate Art by Christopher Turner, a business which allows him to travel across the country performing live art and painting scenes on the spot as they happen.
The artist began creating again and shopped his work around galleries, trying to go the old route of building up a portfolio and submitting it to different places.
The old route didn’t work for Turner, which left him back at square one. He then realized that with live art he had found a gap in the market.
“No one was doing the live painting thing,” he said. “So, I started doing live paintings around Baton Rouge. The first I did was for R&B artist Chrisette Michele at a concert.”
Turner then began live painting LSU games, sometimes auctioning off the paintings for scholarship funding.
“Doing football with, you know, 80,000 people, that led to Final Fours and more big name events,” Turner said. “I actually started getting paid to do live art.”
He said live painting is much more popular now, and he’s even had a mentee, Jacob Zumo, go on to become successful presenting paintings to celebrities of their likenesses, including Snoop Dogg, Jason Aldean and Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Recently, the painter found another crucial untapped market — weddings. Thanks to a suggestion by his wife, he now performs live painting at weddings, providing what she calls a perfect wedding gift to the newlyweds and a lucrative business opportunity.
“We’ve found a niche that a lot of people are very receptive towards,” Ashley said.
Ashley said she’s always considered herself a large part of Art by Christopher Turner.
“When we started the business, it was a 50/50 partnership,” she said. “It wasn’t something that was established, and then I came in. It was something we established together.”
Ashley does everything for the business except the painting. She serves as the person customers touch base with for any concerns, particularly the brides.
She said she likes to tell brides not having live painting at a wedding won’t take away from it, but having one will certainly add to it, and they won’t miss it until they don’t have it.
“Like I tell everybody: I didn’t have a live painter,” Ashley said. “But I married the painter. The painter’s wife doesn’t have a wedding painting.”