Billy Hahn, aka The Wizard Clown, sells his art to Bedford Avenue passerby. — Photos by Mimi Luse

Few emerging artists without gallery representation can claim to support themselves solely through the sale of their artwork, but since quitting his day job this summer, Billy Hahn has been able to count himself as one of those lucky ones.

"I quit my job in June and just started selling my art on the street," he said.

Though Hahn had always made art, until recently, he had been working at American Apparel as a merchandiser, a position for which he had trained in college. After a weekend camping upstate changed his perspective on what he was doing in life, he decided to leave his post. At first he panicked: "The realization set in. ‘Oh my god, I just quit my job in this crazy economy’." he recalls.

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To hold him over until he found something more ideal, Hahn tried to find a part-time job, with little success.

"I looked online and saw job postings for security guards. I went up to Queens and took a course in security guard training, which cost $250. I must have lasted about 3 hours in the class, and I just left. Then I thought, ‘shit I just lost $250 and I still don’t have a job.’" So, he says, "I realized could make art and sell it. I rationalized it, ‘I’m here, I’m young, what’s the risk?’"

Quickly, Hahn screened multiples of a character he’d previously reserved as a gift for close friends, one very leafy Bush Monster, onto hats and teeshirts. He did some simple accounting, using his apparel merchandising training, and explains that he was able to turn a tidy profit from his first business venture.

"I decided to make 10 of everything; 10 tee-shirts, 10 hats, 10 paintings, and price each for 10 bucks and try to sell them on Bedford Avenue," he said. "That day I gained back the money I’d lost."

His makeshift street shop on Bedford Avenue and North 5th has been Hahn’s sole form of income. "Now I go out every Saturday and that’s how I make my living. I spend the rest of the week making the work." Since original art proved to be in higher demand, Hahn switched to selling mostly paintings and drawings.

The routine of bringing his works to market has turned into a ritual for Hahn, both a means of survival and a performance piece in and of itself. When I visited him on a bright September afternoon, he was sitting on the corner of North 5th, in the costume he typically dons to sell his wares, when he assumes the moniker of "The Wizard Clown." He wore suspenders, an ascot, and a small black fitted vest lined in white silk.  Bones too large to be chickens’ hung around his neck, and his face was painted in orange, yellow, and white in the same flat, illustrative brush marks that he uses on his paintings. He wore a small bowler hat and an unkempt bob wig. As always, his forehead bore his signature upside-down cross, a symbol also found in many of his drawings.

"I feel like I can do anything when I put my costume on. With my wig and an upside cross on my head, I look like a spiritual leader. On the bus from Broadway people ask me if I am going to a ceremony… The whole process is spiritual to me, and about creating this imaginary world myself. The hardest thing is accepting ‘the real world’. People are stressed out all the time. People accept that. I don’t. If I’m going to be doing something all the time, I might as well be indulging in a world that doesn’t exist."

The paintings and drawings themselves, mostly portraits of maligned cross-bred animals and beasts of Hahn’s own invention, become the Wizard Clown’s own deranged menagerie, integrated into his persona as a roster he pulls from and references again and again while he’s selling his wares.  Repeatedly, the same characters: the CornDog Horse, Beaver people, SheepBunnies, and Toucan Warriors find their way into his works, and Hahn assigns an intricate back-story to each.

He explains to me with little detachment, in detail, "The frog woman was born half-frog and half-woman, so she spends her time running through the psychedelic swamps leaping on giant lily pads. She takes advantage of this beautiful world and embraces her differences. She belongs to a whole tribe of characters but there is no other frog woman or frog man she’s the only one living life doing her part catching flies with her tongue. I mean heck, if I could be a frog woman I would!"  

Though the works are painted in a child-like style, the beasts often have human genitals and pubic hair, giving each work the same paradoxical quality of both perversity and innocence that make Henry Darger‘s drawings so appealing. Taken as one, his collection of morphologized freak animals stands as a metaphor for deviance, with the tiny forehead crosses that each bears being proof of their suffering and their difference, a feeling shared by The Wizard Clown.

"The upside-down cross has to do with passing judgement," explains the Clown. "When you’re walking down the street, someone can label you for what you look like, but the cross is a self-defined, automatic labeling. My work is about being who you want."

Beyond the  by-hook-or-by-crook performance/survival mechanism that Hahn enacts every week, his work takes on a different feel when extended into a white-walled gallery space, as Hahn was recently invited do an installation piece at the Castle Braid complex for the Brooklyn Artillery show. For this, Hahn slept overnight in the small room alotted him, slowly painting up the walls until he had created a jungle unto itself that is befitting of this season’s [overrated] Wild Things mania.

In the corner, a Virgin Mary statue with the head of a lion casts a spooky mysticality, referencing, as do many of his contemporaries, a surreal otherworld where animal mythology rules. Hahn was pleased with the opportunity and exposure the Artillery show afforded him, and though he looks forward to future opportunities to work within galleries — "I’ve always wanted to paint every animal kingdom; the desert, the ocean, the jungle" — he says that so far, he has been so focused on the practicalities of selling his work week by week that he hasn’t had the time to look into representation.

Instead, he’s been fielding commissions from people who want him for hire; wedding invitations, custom work, things that pay the bills. Back at his home studio, which he shares with house-mates at the Opera House in Bushwick, Hahn shows me a small, messy desk, where he works the remainder of the week, inventing new animals to be sold each Saturday; "I’ve been in such action."

So while the altered world of deranged beasts that Hahn has imagined is a piece with his sale-as-performance, it is also, importantly, made real by the purchasing power of Bedford Avenue passersby who, when they buy one of his pieces, are also purchasing a larger mythology Hahn has conjured around himself. Paradoxically, the "legitimization" of Hahn’s performance by this real-world commercial exchange is the very thing that enables Hahn to overcome that world.

Hahn has succeeded in this aspect so far, but as the weather cools, and his outdoor Williamsburg sale-performance becomes less viable, Hahn has started looking into other ways of supporting himself, temporarily, and he may take a job with a used bookseller in Manhattan to sustain himself at least until the warmer months. For the time being, the Wizard Clown’s hibernation is fine with the endlessly adaptable Hahn.

"I never want to look back and regret. I’ve always been a dreamer. I didn’t even go to art school."