At 5, Bradley Chance Hays got his first pencil and paper set. At 6, his dad gave him his first rope. From then on, his rope and his pencil became his life — and still are. Now, Hays is known for living both paths at once: professional rodeo cowboy and working artist. Born in Oklahoma, he grew up with an art teacher for a mother and a rodeo cowboy for a father, then carried both influences forward through college rodeo at Oklahoma Panhandle State University before finishing his art degree at Oklahoma State University.
“It’s kind of a wild duo,” he said. “Art’s been good to me. It’s opened a lot of doors.”
That dual life is not a backdrop to the work. It is the work. Hays has spent years traveling for rodeos, training horses, painting live, and building a body of art shaped by the people, animals, landscapes, and motion of the western world he actually knows firsthand. Profiles of his career describe him on the road competing as a roper in rodeos while continuing to paint, a rhythm that helps explain the immediacy and lived-in energy of his work.
Growing up the son of a rodeo cowboy and an art teacher, Hays learned both crafts early and has spent his career bringing them together. “It’s tough. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s cost me relationships just to do what I love,” he said. “To make it great, you have to sacrifice things.”
He remembers a childhood shaped as much by discipline as imagination. “She wouldn’t buy me coloring books, you see? I had to draw my own stories and then color them in,” he said. “My mom knew.”
Bradley Chance Hays, "Noble Gaze" and "Dance of the Wind"
That kind of upbringing taught him more than technique. It trained him to build from scratch, to observe, and to rely on instinct. In another reflection on those early years, he described drawing on long rolls of paper while his mother worked nearby and learning to make his own canvases in high school, a foundation that pushed him toward independence and sharpened his creativity early on.
“When I was a kid, I would never get coloring books. While she would cook for my dad in the mornings, my mom would lay out rolls of paper, and I would lay down and draw my stories,” Chance said. “It just stimulated my abilities. I had to do everything myself. My mom made me build my own canvases in high school, too. I never got anything pre-made. It opened that creativity.”
While he had a love for art, he shared that with the rodeo.
“I loved art and my dad was a rodeo man. It was probably one of the best experiences for me because I grew up in a real rodeo home. It was no joke and there wasn’t any messing around,” Chance said. “I just ate it up”.
That background still shows up clearly in the work. Hays is not painting western subjects from a distance. He paints from inside the life itself. Horses, cattle, riders, dust, movement, and tension arrive with a kind of emotional accuracy that comes from repetition and experience, not borrowed imagery. His best pieces feel immediate because they are rooted in something lived.
Bradley Chance Hays, “Sacred” (72x48in)
Hays’ paintings are often as much about force and feeling as they are about subject matter. His expressionistic handling gives the work motion and pressure, while his western themes keep it grounded in the world he continues to travel through. That combination has made him recognizable not just as a western artist, but as someone whose art and rodeo life remain inseparable. Recent profiles continue to describe him that way: “a real cowboy,” competitive roper, live painter, and artist moving between rodeo arenas, studios, galleries, and western events across the country.
Meet the Pack!
Chance’s dogs have become part of the experience and something of a local tradition during his time in Saratoga Springs. His cattle dogs — Jake, Pearl, and Moose — along with a small mutt named Nemo, often accompany him while he paints, drawing just as much attention and affection as the artist himself.
For those who know Bradley Chance Hays’ summer tenures, the dogs are part of the memory: a familiar presence beside the easel, a little extra personality around the work, and another reflection of the life he brings with him wherever he goes.
The year of the pandemic presented Hays with the kind of disruption that changed rhythms for everyone, artists and rodeo competitors included. During that period, he spent time in Montana, crossing paths with local artists, riding horses, and leading excursions through wooded and mountainous country. Time spent deeper in what he calls the “real world” only pushed the work further, reinforcing the sense that his strongest paintings come out of direct contact with land, weather, animals, and motion.
Bradley Chance Hays, “Guardians” (60x72in)
Time spent closer to that landscape only sharpened what has always made Hays’ work distinctive. His paintings are not rooted in western imagery as an aesthetic alone, but in a life he continues to live. Horses, cattle, movement, weather, and open land arrive in the work with a kind of urgency that feels earned. Even in his more expressive pieces, there is something grounded beneath the surface.
That is part of what makes his work resonate so strongly with collectors. The paintings carry energy, but they also carry experience. They feel informed by discipline, repetition, instinct, and a deep familiarity with the subjects he returns to again and again.
Bradley Chance Hays, (above) “Gathering”, 48x72in and (below) "The Herd" 48x60in
Bradley Chance Hays is compelling because the two sides of his life never feel separate. Whether he is painting live in Saratoga Springs, traveling for rodeo, or spending time out West with horses, dogs, and open land, he brings the same focus to both paths. His life has been shaped by discipline, instinct, movement, and a determination to stay true to both the rope and the pencil that defined him from the beginning.
