Pageant Queen Discovers Hidden Talent That Changes Her Entire Life (Exclusive)

Jessica Haas’s family is “aggressive about their dreams.” It’s one of the first things she tells PEOPLE in a phone interview from her house in Tennessee, fresh off several whirlwind months of travel.

Born and raised in Texas, Haas plainly admits she “comes from poverty — real poverty.” She was brought up by a single mother, and when they weren’t living in subsidized housing, they were living out of a car. Together, they would dumpster dive when they didn’t have the things they needed to get by. And her grandmother, who helped raise her, would sew her clothes out of leftover fabric, instructing her to tell her schoolmates that she bought them at Dillard’s.

But that didn’t stop Haas’s mom from encouraging her to pursue her goals, no matter how outlandish they were.

“She told me I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, and I believed her — when I was near calling the pavement my pillow,” Haas says. “I just believed her.”

From the beginning — as early as she could hold a crayon — Haas was sure she wanted to be an artist. Little did she, her mom or her grandmother know that Haas would build a legendary career in speed-painting, becoming a staple across the entertainment world for an unusual talent that combines artistry and showmanship in a way that only she could.

But before she would dazzle in sparkly jumpsuits on the NBA court, slinging paint faster than audiences could tell what she was creating, Haas started in the world of teen pageants. 

When she was in grade school, her history teacher encouraged her to enter Miss Texarkana’s Teen Pageant. And even though Haas knew nothing about pageants, her family had to borrow nearly everything she would wear and she felt like a “wallflower” among her affluent and seasoned pageant queen competitors, she agreed.

“I don’t really do anything halfway,” she says. 

Her work ethic, even as a teenager, propelled her to a win, surprising everyone around Haas, even herself. But as a newbie in the pageant community, it wasn’t until after she was crowned Miss Teen Texarkana that she learned there were state competitions to follow.

“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s more?’ ” says Haas. “I didn’t even know what I was getting into.”

Advancing to the state level was a whole new ballgame. Her competitors, for one, were “sculpted” to the nines — their gowns pristine, their hair in perfect dos. And she needed a pageant talent, one that could be shown off within the 90-second time limit.

To address the former, Haas and her family had to get crafty. (“We just DIY-ed every inch of everything,” she remembers.) But the latter presented a bigger problem: How could she possibly show off what she believed to be her greatest talent — her artistic ability — in such a short window? 

She enlisted her school’s art teacher to help.

“Every day after school, she agreed to work with me,” says Haas. For an hour, her teacher would pull out a stopwatch and have Haas draw a portrait under the clock, yelling out the seconds remaining as Haas colored and shaded with charcoal, like she was a training athlete.

“Our garage was filled with trash bags of portraits,” she says. “I didn’t have that competitiveness to throw a ball in a hoop, but I did have that competitiveness for my art to be better than yours.”

At the state teen pageant, Haas finished in the top 15, but even more importantly, she solidified her belief that speed-painting was worth pursuing. After all, it was the subject of Haas’s first newspaper article, published after she competed. (Though the headline wasn’t the most flattering — something along the lines of “Pageant Contestant Competes with Unusual Talent,” remembers Haas — it had her daughter’s picture, and her mom framed it anyway.)

After several more years of competing, she eventually aged out of teen pageants and set her sights on the prestigious Miss Tennessee crown in 2013. But as she was preparing, people in the pageant world would constantly tell her she’d have a much better chance if she’d just give up her artistic pursuits for a more conventional pageant talent like singing. 

Haas was indignant.

“I’m not going to go on a stage and learn a song that I can’t really sing,” she says. “I’ve got some killer skills here — I’m sticking to my boots. So I did.”

If she was going to have a shot as an underdog pageant contestant, she knew she needed to upgrade her equipment and perfect her act, so she worked with an engineer to custom-design an easel, which would allow her to easily rotate her canvas at the end of her 90 seconds of painting to unveil her instant masterpiece.

“All of these girls thought I was coming with a poster board,” she says, slyly. “Oh no, no, no. I let that be a surprise.”

On the day of the pageant, says Haas, “nobody had any expectations for me.” But when it was time to show off her talent, she was ready.

“The music starts,” remembers Haas. “I pick up the paintbrush. And I go in.”

In a video later uploaded to YouTube, Haas, in a sparkly blue jumpsuit, her bright smile gleaming, walks up to the stage and starts to paint. First, she grabs yellow, making what seem to be abstract swooshes on a large black canvas. Then she takes some red, marking up the bottom of the canvas with quick, sharp movements. She uses a bit of white to quickly add highlights, before rotating the canvas to reveal what she had been creating upside-down from the beginning: a portrait of Jesus Christ.

“No way,” one person can be heard saying in the clip as the canvas flips — before the rest of the crowd bursts into cheers at the stunning reveal.

“The reaction was something I had never heard ever before — it was like church in an arena,” recalls Haas. “Tears are streaming down my face because I don’t care if I win. This is enough for me.”

But Haas did win — and she remembers she “literally knocked the roses out of this lady’s hand” from excitement as she came to the stage to accept her prize.

“I was barreling down there like an athlete. I almost tackled the current title holder,” says Haas. “I did not look like some graceful pageant queen.”

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That victory changed everything for her. Haas was called by a talent agency a few days later. She was invited on an ABC revival of The Gong Show, a reality show where she competed in front of celebrity judges Jennifer Aniston and Jack Black. And she started to perform at what she calls the “Easter baskets” of professional sports — the NFL, NBA and MLB.

As Haas gained popularity around the world, so did speed-painting in the pageant community. New York Magazine even called her “the mother of the pageant speed-painting movement” in 2016. (“I was 26 when they called me and told me that, so I wasn’t keen on the word ‘mother,’ but I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll take it!’ ” Haas jokes.)

And today, her act is even more elaborate and ambitious than what she showed off on the Miss Tennessee stage over a decade ago. Her canvases are bigger, her audiences larger and her outfits even sparklier.

“I like to entertain — to me it’s a science,” says Haas. “I’m your speed-painter Barbie, you could say.”

For Haas, her success is vindication after so many people — “stuffy” art professors who told Haas her work wasn’t “conceptual” enough, or “butthead” pageant judges who made snarky comments about her wardrobe — that she could make her dreams a reality.

“I like to look at my house because I’ve never lived in a house this big,” says Haas over the phone at the end of the interview, sitting in her home office. “I don’t look at my trophies or my accolades for encouragement. I look at my house, and I think of what my mom told me — that I could be whatever I wanted to be.”

Nearly every wall in her house has a mural she’s painted, and her office is covered in hearts.

“This house never had a chance — white walls everywhere,” she laughs. “It looks like a crazy person painted it.”

And maybe she was crazy for chasing her lofty aspirations of becoming an artist, Haas says.

“I came from poverty,” she says again. “And I did this with my own hands.”

“I’m proof that you can and you should believe in your dreams — that you should go after them, because if you don’t, who will?” says Haas. “Honestly, how weird. I’m a speed-painter!”