Steve Holst is often stopped by tourists who want to take a picture while he is painting the town red—the town’s curbs, that is. Each spring he uses a homemade, self-propelled striping machine to paint about 3.5 miles of red curbs and do other striping work in Eureka Springs. He has been doing this for 29 years.
It takes Steve a couple months to paint traffic lines to help drivers keep on the right side of the street in a town where there are roads with two-way traffic squeezed into one lane.
He also transforms his striping machine into a mist-breathing dragon that is a hit in Eureka Springs parades. He has long sold postcards and published cartoons. Currently, after getting fully immunized to Covid-19, he does stand-up comedy at the monthly open-mike night at the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice and Ecology in Fayetteville. He also carves wooden spoons that he sells on his Facebook page to benefit OMNI’s Mayday Community Food Kitchen.
Steve’s street painting qualifies as art, as does the rest of what he does.
“Actually, I took an art class last year, and the teacher said my striping machine was a drawing tool,” Steve said. “If you want graffiti that can be seen from space, I’m your guy. Eureka Springs is pretty unique. It’s quite an undertaking. I built a weird contraption that paints the tops and sides of the curbs at the same time. The whole city takes a while to paint between rainstorms.”
His custom-built striper is useful in Eureka Springs’ steep hills.
“I got tired of pushing the striper, so my dad and I made a specialized self-propelled striping machine to do the work,” Steve said.
Due to the pandemic, it has been a while since Eureka Springs has had parades, but Steve and his dragon – both in costume – were regulars before that. He loves seeing people’s reactions. The machine’s paint spray gun is adapted to spray mist, and there is a bubble machine on the back. He attached sections of buckets to the back end so he can wag the tail.
“What inspired me is I was in the junkyard and saw a whole pickup load of oil pans,” Steve said. “I picked up a couple that looked exactly like dragon heads. The rest wasn’t hard to do.”
He has been riding the dragon in parades since about 2000. He used to have bubblettes following him down the street, people with pantyhose on their heads stuffed with balloons.
“I had the two to six-year-old demographic in my pocket,” Steve said. “In addition to fame and glory, l also made money on prizes. The dragon is kind of like cartoons. Cartoons are like land mines. You can draw this little picture that sits around in a drawer for years. Sometimes, years later, someone will laugh and have an organic reaction to it. It is the same with the dragon. People just like it. There is a continuous wave of people getting a big kick out of it. That’s the thing about parades. Everybody is there just to have fun. It’s kind of the same business as cartooning.”
Originally from California, he lived on a communal farm at the University of Santa Cruz, but they got kicked out because one of the women came within 15 minutes of having a baby on school property. The farmers stuck together and moved to Arkansas where they bought and operated the Home Farm in Searcy County.
His folks visited him in 1980, fell in love with Arkansas, sold their family business striping parking lots in the Bay Area, and moved to Searcy County where they lived for 25 years.
Steve was part of a hippie crew planting trees for a living during his earlier years in Arkansas.
“We built our houses and paid off our land that way,” Steve said. “After planting trees for ten years, striping didn’t look that bad. My dad and I built a road striper that looks like a dune buggy. In 1995, I went into business with my dad in road striping. We found a bunch of work in Branson.”
Steve was helping launch the city’s Public Works recycling program in the early 1990s when he met his partner, Burnetta Hinterhuer.
“The Public Works department in Eureka is pretty heroic,” Steve said. “Eureka is Disneyland with infrastructure from the 1800s. It’s a pretty amazing job they do.”
Although they now live in Fayetteville, Steve and Burnetta still maintain close ties to Eureka Springs. Steve stays with a friend here while doing spring striping.
Does he ever get upset to see those black marks from tires that mar the red curbs?
“That’s my job security,” he said.
He also teaches cartooning, which he claims is not that difficult to learn.
“Little kids are natural born illustrators,” he said. “When I teach cartooning, my main goal is to get a pencil in their hand. People create their own world. My cartooning is mostly a hobby. I’m not really good at marketing. Mostly I give them away.”
He tried doing his stand-up comedy during the pandemic but found that Zoom performances were difficult because of the lack of audience feedback.
“Talking to people telling stories and jokes, you have to honor people’s attention,” he said. “Whatever energy is in the room, you are playing with that. Stand-up comedy is pretty much the same business as cartoon and parades. You’re making people laugh.”