Shaw’s Bar & Grill, 1528 University Ave. NE, became an outdoor art gallery during Art-A-Whirl®. The blank north wall of the building was a more than suitable place to display the work of the late Roger Pickering, a noted outdoor artist.
There was a time when Pickering’s art was splashed all around the Twin Cities on walls and billboards. In the days before large-format printers, he was a sign painter. If you’ve seen the ghost sign on the side of the old Grain Belt Brewery, you’ve seen his work.
Pickering’s daughter, Jeana, shared his story with the Northeaster.
“Roger grew up during the Depression and learned at an early age the value of hard work, whether it was as a Western Union telegram delivery boy, having a paper route or picking up golf balls in milk pails for 6 cents a pail.
“At 15, he started at Kaufmann Outdoor Advertising for 40 cents an hour painting lumber for signs. At 17, he quit school and went into the Navy, the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. They promised him he’d be out at 21, and after seeing the world from the decks of a ship, sailing into Normandy on D-Day and marrying a Navy WAVE, he received an honorable discharge. Roger and his bride returned to Minnesota where he restarted his career with Kaufmann and General Outdoor.
“He ultimately made his way to Naegele Outdoor Advertising to become an apprentice and eventually a journeyman. Having no formal school training, Roger was fortunate to work with a number of experienced artists over the years who taught him the finer points of sign artistry. After 22 years at Naegele, they made him a ‘pictorial sign artist.’ The company sent him to Kentucky in 1980 to hone his craft and he was the headliner in the Variety section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune in April of 1986 for an article on sign artists.”
Pickering worked from sketches and photos and from patterns created for the sign painters. It was not an easy job.
“Working outdoors on billboards could often be very dangerous. [He painted] in below-zero weather (keeping small paint cans inside his jacket to keep them warm) and climbed icy iron ladder rungs to reach the sign as well as in the blistering heat in the summer. He worked on a swing stage (a 30-inch-wide plank) sometimes as many as ten stories up with no safety harnesses — only ropes to tie the stage off to the building. There were many close calls in his career, but he was privileged to paint plenty of interesting and varied subjects over the years. Among them, the side of the massive Grain Belt Brewery, MTC buses and vans for the Minnesota Zoo, dozens of Schmidt and Grain Belt beer billboards and the signs atop the old Met Stadium.
“In 1981 he was tasked with creating a billboard depicting international artist LeRoy Nieman’s ‘Stadium Tennis’ contemporary painting. Commissioned by Elayne Galleries, the resulting 14 ft. x 48 ft. billboard was personally signed by Nieman. Roger received accolades from the artist for his hand-painted reproduction on the billboard which was located in downtown Minneapolis.
“Roger retired in 1987. His favorite commentary on his long and storied career were the dozens of people who would continually ask, ‘How do you keep the paint from freezing?,’ never bothering to ask how the painter himself kept from freezing!
“After retirement Roger continued to paint, only on a much smaller scale. As in his pictorial sign artist career, he painted a wide variety of subjects, painting until he passed away in 2022 at 98 years old.”
The paintings on the wall at Shaw’s were not from original subject matter, but replicated the work of others, with Pickering’s personal touches.
Pickering working on a Schmidt Beer sign. Pickering painted the iconic Grain Belt beer mural on the side of the brewery back when deer and a fountain graced the area. A ghost of the sign remains. (Photos provided by Jeana Shaw)
