About 15 years ago, Roger Black’s friend, local artist Bob Grunditz, was painting custom signs for the Great Alaskan Bowl Company and asked Black for help. Black, who has a background in fine art, had never done a sign before. So he figured out what to do and got to work. “The first time I put paint on a flat background making those Bowl Company signs,” he recalled in his shop recently, “I was hooked.” He discovered that the paint “flowed like liquid glass from the brush.”
For Black, who now operates the hand-painted sign company Hardluck Studios, it completed a journey that began in childhood and ended in Alaska, where he found the job he wanted to do in the place where he was destined to live. “I should have been born here,” he said, reflecting on his drift north.
Black’s work can be seen widely in Fairbanks, gracing major attractions including Pioneer Park and the Fairbanks Children’s Museum, local businesses like Jack’s Auto Service and Bankstown Bike and Ski, as well as homes, offices, vehicles and, most recently, an airplane. private. He’s become a Fairbanks fixture, but for Black, it all started in Texas, where he was a misfit kid who watched hockey and skiing on TV and created art. “I was a fish out of water,” he said.
Black grew up in San Angelo, Texas, spending much of his childhood at Terlingua Ranch, which his grandfather managed (he was present at the inaugural World’s Chili Cook-off in 1967). “I’ve always been outside,” he said of raising him. So when it came time to choose a college major, “I thought, maybe forestry and wildlife.”
Black attended Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, “in East Texas, in the swamps,” he laughed. He also studied art, focusing on drawing and classical oil painting. “Which is probably one of the reasons I fell in love with this,” she said, indicating the sign he was working on.
During these years he married and pursued a career, but eventually his marriage began to fall apart and he needed a change. So she accepted a friend’s offer to come to Fairbanks for a while. It was the fulfillment of a dream. “I always wanted to come here,” she said. She had never forgotten a National Geographic show she watched in the early 1980s about three families living off the land. “I was hooked on Alaska. That’s all it took.
Black arrived along with the first cold blast of winter. “I arrived in the city on October 28, 1998,” she said. “The first night I was here I went for a walk.” It was well below freezing, but thanks to the advice of his friend, Black had already bought clothing suitable for the temperature. “Ten cars stopped me and asked me if everything was okay and if I needed help,” he recalled. He had never experienced such kindness. “That was my first impression of Alaskans. Since then, I have not been disappointed. Neither in the people, nor in the culture, nor in the environment”.
In later years, he married Susie Halfhill, a poet who often helps with Hardluck’s work (when talking about the business, Black frequently refers to “us”, not “me”, clearly referring to both), and the couple bought their Murphy Dome. house in a wooded pocket where the studio is installed in an outbuilding that they remodeled. “I’ve been here 25 years,” he said of Fairbanks. “This is my community.”
Along with Grunditz, Black cited others who helped him on the road to building Hardluck Studios. He refers to the late Mike Brooks as his mentor, both when he first ventured into sign painting and after he established the business. “He showed me some techniques over the years,” Black said. And when Black had a problem or question about how to properly paint a sign, he “always had the solution.”
In 2011, at the encouragement of Brooks, Black decided to try running a custom sign business. And after a couple of years of spreading the word and taking small jobs, he said, all of a sudden, “the phone started ringing one fall.”
His first big job was to replace the signs in Pioneer Park. As he was showing the park to visiting family members, he told his wife that the signs were in disrepair. “You could barely read them,” he said. “You could see the peeling and cracked paint.” His wife suggested that they submit an unsolicited design proposal. Upon seeing it, the park management realized that the existing signs needed to be replaced and opened a competitive bidding process. Black’s proposal was the only one for hand-painted signs that matched Pioneer Park’s themed look. “They called me and told me: ‘It’s yours. You have the whole set up.’”
This was the turning point for his business. “It really took off.”
Black said his favorite works are for clients who come to him for inspiration. Instead of just offering ideas, “I get to pick the brains out of him.” He talks with them about his goals for the sign, watching their responses to suggestions, so he can “get what they want out of them.” By drawing them into the creative process, they help him design a poster that reflects his individuality. “There is nothing standardized. Everything is personalized.
Black has done paint on vehicle doors, but a recent request was his first, painting Rocky the Squirrel on a friend’s Piper Cub. “This plane is the first one I’ve ever made,” he said. “I am quite demanding with my outdoor work. My paint stops curing at fifty. He wants to get it set up correctly because once the plane takes off into the sky, “that’s going to be the most stressful situation for any of my paintings in my career.”
Black found his home, calling, and community in Fairbanks. “I do this 50/50 for the smiles,” she said of his work, adding that he would do it for free, but “unfortunately we have to have money.”
