In a quiet kitchen in Eugene, Oregon, far from the galleries of New York or the marketplaces of Milan, Lael Salaets sits at his kitchen table with a pencil in hand and a dog curled at his feet. Most nights, he’ll spend six to eight hours here, drawing in silence under a soft kitchen light. This is not a studio in the romantic sense, but it’s where his world comes into focus.
“I’m primarily a pencil artist,” he says, almost modestly, though the depth and nuance in his work speak otherwise. What begins as a simple walk with his dog often ends in a series of quiet moments captured urban still lifes, emotional echoes, and unspeakable truths rendered in graphite and colored pencil.
Salaets, who moved from western Massachusetts to Oregon in 1980 in what he jokingly refers to as a possible side effect of “Reaganomics,” is self-taught in spirit but formally trained at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. For over two decades, he worked as an independent graphic designer. “I loved the work, but I didn’t like the business,” he says, echoing the conflicted hearts of so many creative professionals.
Drawing, however, was never negotiable. It wasn’t simply a skill; it was survival.
Growing up with ADHD, Salaets found early on that drawing was the only thing that brought stillness to his mind. “It was the one way I could focus,” he says. “And that kind of focus when you’re a child with ADHD is both exhausting and exhilarating.”
He enlisted in the Marines after high school, then returned to the Pacific Northwest for school and work. And through every shift economic, emotional, and societal, his pencils remained steady. “Drawing usually gets me through things,” he says. “I’ve always gone back to it as a way of processing.”
Much of his work begins with a photo snapped in passing, a shadow, a building, a pair of chairs left behind, and ends in a narrative that emerges somewhere between his conscious intent and subconscious memory. “I like it when something suggests a story,” he says. “That’s what makes a drawing more than just an image.”
But Salaets resists the lure of signature motifs. In fact, he’s wary of becoming too predictable. “No offense to people who draw cats all day,” he laughs. “But I don’t like to get stuck in a corner. Even when I’m drawing, if I find myself focusing too long on one section, I stop and move to another area. I have to keep moving.”
That instinct to not only work, but work freely, is what gives his art its striking range. One piece might be a stark, minimalist still life; another, a dense weave of hyperrealism with quiet political undertones. “I don’t set out to make a statement,” he says. “I just try to be honest. And sometimes that honesty is quiet. Sometimes it’s angry. But it’s never forced.”
And yet, like many working artists today, Salaets is deeply aware of the gap between creating art and sustaining a life. “I’ve had people look at my work and say, ‘You’re going to make a lot of money doing this.’ And I laugh,” he says. “There was a time I stretched my own canvases from scrap wood, wore mechanic coveralls, and painted with three colors. I had a trash can lid for a palette.”
His experience mirrors the data. A 2024 study by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council found that 25% of artists are living on less than $15,000 a year. “How do you live on $15,000?” he asks. “You don’t.”
Still, Salaets draws. Not for money, though he certainly welcomes sales, but because he has to. “It’s how I make sense of the world. It’s how I communicate, even when I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”
And sometimes, it finds its way into the world in unexpected ways. A college professor once bought one of Salaets’s pieces at an airport and later sent him a photo of it hanging in a London loft. “To know that something I made is on someone’s wall halfway around the world that means something,” he says.
Salaets dreams of exploring more literal narrative still-life arrangements that tell deeper, more deliberate stories, but he worries about marketability. “Who wants to hang that on their wall?” he wonders. “Some people, maybe. But most people don’t want to talk about the hard stuff.”
He doesn’t romanticize the artist’s struggle, nor does he chase a fashionable brand of resistance art. “Sure, I’m a democratic socialist,” he says, “but I’m not out here painting American flags on dumpster fires.”
He draws because it’s his language. His meditation. His protest, on occasion, but more often, his prayer. “There’s always something in the work that teaches me,” he says. “Even if I don’t know what it is at first. And I’ve learned to be okay with that.”
Like his drawings, Salaets himself resists a single narrative. He is a veteran. A designer. A philosopher. A self-aware cynic with a reverent streak. And above all, he’s an artist in the truest sense, one who does the work, even when no one is looking. One who believes that honesty, more than polish, is what people really come for.
And if they don’t? Well, he’ll still be at his kitchen table. Drawing. Watching. Processing. Waiting for the next story to appear.