He started at an old Waldo bar. Now this NOLA artist paints music greats — and Chiefs
Since I’d dropped by his studio and all, John Bukaty thought maybe he’d do a painting real quick.
It’s not as improbable as it sounds. Bukaty, a Kansas Citian turned New Orleanian, is a live painter of considerable renown. He flies all over the country to paint in front of crowds at concerts, weddings, auctions, sporting events. He was in Colorado last week for a one-man show, Cuba the week before with Trombone Shorty and Taj Mahal. Paintings that take him a couple of hours to produce are regularly sold for thousands of dollars.
“It’s easier for me to paint and talk than it is for me to just sit there and fidget in a chair and answer questions,” Bukaty assured me. “Give me a few minutes here to get all my stuff set up.”
I wanted to talk to Bukaty, in part, because sports figures heavily into his art. He is the son of Fred Bukaty, a Denver Broncos fullback in the early 1960s, and Bukaty himself played defensive end at the University of Kansas in the 1990s.
“I grew up playing football and doing art,” he said. “Those were my two main things. I started painting jayhawks when I was in third grade. I was a huge fan of NFL Films — the super slo-mo camera work, the knuckles bleeding, the guys with no teeth. And my dad loved poetry. So there was always this mix of art and football in our house.”
After leaving KU, Bukaty moved back to Kansas City — he’d grown up in south KC and attended Rockhurst (“They kicked me out”) and Bishop Miege — and struggled to find his footing as an artist. He couldn’t finish anything. He couldn’t get work.
“I think a lot of artists are introverts,” Bukaty said. “But I’m extroverted. So every time I was in the studio by myself, I’d get scared. I realized I wanted to make art in front of people. And I really felt that way when I would go see live music. Every time I went to a show, I’d be like, ‘I want to paint now.’”
One night in 2001, Bukaty set up his canvas at 75th Street Brewery, the now-shuttered Waldo brewpub, and painted while a band played. People seemed to like it. But for Bukaty, it was a breakthrough.
“I knew that live art was a thing people did, but when I was doing it I had these moments where I would feel nothing except total presence in the moment,” he said. “It was like catching a groove. I could feed off the energy of the music and put it in the painting. So, that’s how it began. I did that every Thursday up there for two years.”
He eventually moved to Denver and did a similar thing at a venue called Cervantes. He fell in with the jam-band community there, painting musicians like Warren Haynes, Drew Emmitt, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks when they performed at the club.
He landed in New Orleans the way a lot of people do.
“I came down to visit a woman during Jazz Fest and never came back,” Bukaty said.
They had two kids together. Bukaty is now divorced, sober and the head of an increasingly thriving small business. He has continued to paint local music luminaries: Dr. John, Kermit Ruffins, Art Neville, Anders Osborne. One of his paintings became a Steve Winwood album cover in 2017. Live music remains his passion.
But Bukaty has also tapped into corporate demand for his work. He’s done commissions for Chipotle, BMW and Toyota; you can find him creating live art at major events like Big Slick, Chiefs games and a KU basketball game next month.
“No artist wants to attach the word ‘corporate’ to what they do, but that’s where all the money is,” Bukaty said. “And really, I like the corporate events. I go to Grand Cayman and paint some landscapes and get paid a lot of money sometimes. That’s what I wished for in my early days, and it came true. So it’s just about balancing it all.”
The Chiefs transitioning from the coulda-been-a-contenders of his youth into a dynasty in search of a three-peat has also been good for business. A Patrick Mahomes painting on his website is currently going for $5,000, and similar work fetches far more than that at fundraisers.
Bukaty’s studio is in a building underneath the Pontchartrain Expressway. From the entrance, you could see the Superdome about a mile away — a champagne spaceship looming in the distance. Among the many works inside his big, airy loft was a recent painting inspired by a particularly spicy Mahomes rushing touchdown earlier this season against the San Francisco 49ers.
Given the circumstances — me in town for the Super Bowl — Bukaty went with a football theme for his painting: Travis Kelce, ball in hand, on the hunt for some yards after catch. Bukaty sketched it out with a pencil, then brought in the acrylic paints. He was barefoot, having long ago slipped off his paint-splattered black Vans slip-ons. He set a timer for 50 minutes and told me his story.
At one point, Bukaty applied a large, red brush stroke near Kelce’s shoulder. It curved down a little toward its edge.
“Oh, I regret that,” he said. “I had some harmony going and that kind of messed it up.”
“Live painting is like music to a certain extent,” Bukaty continued. “Sometimes you have a sloppy set. But if you’re too serious, it takes the fun out of it. So we’re just going to free-flow today. Miles Davis. ‘Bitches Brew.’”
When the timer went off, he’d created a recognizably Bukatyesque painting: Kelce in a white Chiefs uniform, on the move, lots of abstract pinks and yellows and greens shooting off his body. Bukaty signed the canvas. But it wasn’t really done.
“Tomorrow, I’ll look at it and be like, ‘Why didn’t you tighten that up?’” he said. “And I’ll probably go in and tighten it. But today I’m going to avoid that responsibility. It’s about having fun with it in the moment. That’s why I became an artist. And hopefully people will be able to see that when they look at the painting.”
This story was originally published February 7, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
