Switching gears

When it comes down to it, Anne Hicks said she was at the right place at the right time.

“Every town the circus would travel to would have a local ad agency that would place local ads [for Ringling Bros. Circus], and I was at a drawing table when the circus [representative] sent a drawing of a tiger in a billboard to my drawing table,” Hicks said. “She said, ‘I really hate this tiger. Can you do better?’”

So, she did.

Hicks, who has lived in Mountain Brook her whole life, took the weekend to come up with and paint a better idea: to have the tiger’s paws ripping out of the illustration. When she handed it over the following Monday, the representatives from Ringling Bros. Circus loved it and, much to her surprise, put it on billboards advertising the circus all across the U. S. 

They followed up with her and asked her to come up with a brand new idea for a show poster, which she painted for them. Shortly after, her poster was put on the cover of Variety magazine.

“It was used all over the country, both the billboard and the poster,” she said, for the following two years, during which time she continued to design nationally-used logos and posters for shows. Even when Hicks became pregnant with her first child, she kept designing for them over the months that followed, and the representatives from the Ringling Bros. Circus account decided they loved one of her posters enough to put it on the program they sell at the show. She said she was thrilled. 

“At that point, I was actually due,” she said, laughing. “But the baby was very cooperative. What I had to do is paint the back cover, and the baby ended up two weeks late, which was very nice. I managed to finish the painting at 5:30 at night and went home and went into labor the next morning at 4:30.”

The agency actually won the national Ringling Bros. Circus account that year, she said, for all of her posters. After that, she decided to retire for a little bit, since her son was especially prone to “being awake at all hours.”

“He still doesn’t [sleep]. He is now working in the semiconductor industry, working at all hours,” Hicks said. 

Over the years, she said she never got back into painting and designing for an agency again. 

Instead, three more babies — all of whom she and her husband are very proud of and have “paid them back a thousand times over”— followed. While she worked as a stay-at-home mom, she taught herself how to paint portraits, which she mostly did for friends and family.

“That was a perfect mom job I could do in my spare time,” Hicks said. “… I’ve painted our kids a lot, also my nieces and nephews to give to my parents. So, their houses are filled with portraits of their grandchildren.”

But now that all four of her kids are grown and moved out of the house, Hicks said she’s found her way to another unusual illustrating adventure, one she “never saw coming.” Hicks started drawing posters and portraits of racing vehicles, motorcycles and famed drivers at Barber Motorsports Park.

“They’re all wonderful people.  That’s what surprised me before I became a racing fan. I didn’t know how nice everyone was,” Hicks said. “I haven’t see anyone who’s not extremely nice. That’s so impressive to me ... They’re very polite and very humble, great guys.” 

Her whole life, she said, her husband has always been a racing fanatic and was extremely excited when they built the Barber track. Since the beginning, he’s been their volunteer photographer, she said, and one day he came home and asked her if she would paint a picture of John Surtees in his Ferrari, with owner George Barber talking through the window to him.

So, she did, and after her husband showed the painting to someone at Barber's, the person said "We never know what to get for Mr. Barber for Christmas," so she painted it again and they gave it to Mr. Barber.

Then they asked me to paint a poster,” Hicks said. “I didn’t know anything, I’d never even been [to Barber Motorsports Park] before, so I painted the poster never having been before and not knowing anything about motorcycles.”

That was 10 years ago, she said, and she just finished her 10th Barber Vintage Festival poster. The Vintage Festival is the park’s second biggest event and the second most-attended event, with around 70,000 people coming each year. 

To aid in her new illustration endeavors, she’s started to help her husband do track photography during the races and weekend events so she can paint from memory as well as photographs.

“It’s really fun because you’re so close, and you can actually see their body motions when they’re coming around,” Hicks said. “I definitely paint from pictures, but having been next to the track, I think that’s improved my paintings.”

Since she didn’t grow up around the sport, she said it was only after they asked her to paint that first poster that she started becoming a racing fan like her husband. 

As of the last year, she’s been inspired enough by the races and the people involved in the sport to try a different type of painting, one that combines portraiture and movement of racing. She recently finished painting the winners for the last two years of the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama, which she said the winners and fans of the sport have responded well to. She also hopes to go back and paint all the winners from the previous years. 

When she won the Ringling Bros. Circus account, Hicks said she was too shy to use the free tickets the ad agency gave her to go behind-the-stage and meet the circus stars. That was a mistake she would never make again, she said, so when the people at Barber Motorsports and Zoom Motorsports arranged for she and her husband to receive media credentials to come to Monaco, she took them up on it.

“I’ve gotten to meet some of these motorcycle racers, Indy racers, and they’re all wonderful people,” Hicks said.

For more information on races, go to barberracingevents.com.

Editor's note: this story was updated on Dec. 28 to reflect accurate information and quotes Hicks provided.