One gauge of the artistic temperament is how much suffering the artist is willing to put up with.

For example, musician Andy Friedman once toured Manhattan saloons, clubs and dive bars with a show that consisted of slides of his oil paintings and recitations of his poetry.

When asked whether he got heckled, Friedman responds to the effect that, “Well, of course I got heckled.”

But Friedman is made of strong stuff.

Friedman says art has always been his religion. He has always depended on art to help answer the cosmic and workaday questions in his life.

So he figured that anything he felt spiritually connected to could theoretically be spiritually fulfilling for others as well.

“I thought, ‘If these paintings are worth what I think they are,’ ” Friedman says, “then what I find interesting might be of interest to someone else,” he says.

As for the heckling and other forms of demonstrative misunderstanding, Friedman was unfazed.

“Whether the audience reacts negatively or not, that doesn’t change my contribution. I’m the art pastor. You wouldn’t ask a priest what he does when they don’t like his sermon up there.”

The route by which Friedman became a highly respected singer-songwriter is as improbable as any path to a career in music has ever been.

He will perform with his band the Golden Winners at the Brass Rail on Saturday night.

At one point on his art tour of bars, Friedman decided to add musicians who could provide pleasant background sounds. One of the guitar players convinced him to learn a couple of chords. Before too long, Friedman decided that it was the pictures that had become the distraction.

“I tricked myself into becoming a songwriter,” he says. “I never thought I had a musical bone in my body. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I am still just a painter and a poet.”

Friedman spent much of the first part of his life knowing he would be a painter for the rest of it. He attended art academies as a child and the Rhode Island School of Design as a young man.

The whip-around in his artistic evolution was triggered by an oil painting of Friedman’s grandfather called “Pilot Light.”

Friedman worked 3 1/2 years on it and let it dry for a customary year before varnishing it.

Unfortunately, only the surface of the painting had dried and the varnish removed this top layer, exposing the wet paint underneath.

Friedman likens it to peeling off the skin that sometimes forms on pots of pudding. The painting was ruined and so, unexpectedly, was Friedman’s drive to be a painter.

“And not because I was so weak and thinking ‘boo, hoo, hoo; oh woe is me,’ ” Friedman says. “I don’t know what happened to me. I went crazy working on that painting.”

Friedman says people asked him why he didn’t just start working on another painting; the perennial “get back on that horse” type of advice. “It was like saying to a painter who’d lost his hands, ‘Why don’t you just paint with your feet?’ ”

But Friedman recalled something a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design had said to him. It was painter and illustrator Richard Merkin, who died Sept. 12 at age 70.

“I was telling him how my whole life was going to go,” Friedman says, “and he laughed. His moustache was always crooked. It danced with his laughing mouth.

“He said, ‘Andy, it’s good to make plans, but you have got to understand life is going to turn out better or worse than those plans. At least plans take you somewhere.’ ”

Friedman began to learn to roll with the punches.

Merkin got Friedman a job in the mailroom of the New Yorker, and before too long Friedman was writing short live-music previews for the magazine in exchange for tickets to the sort of shows he loved most: blues, folk and roots music.

He always got backstage at these shows and befriended the venerable performers, soaking in their hard-won wisdom.

Friedman is, among many other things, a fascinating conversationalist, and it was his attentiveness to these musicians’ memories coupled with his disinterest in the shallower preoccupations of our society that gave him opportunities other music fans do not tend to get.

For example, folk singer Greg Brown invited him to go ice fishing with him. Brown told him something on that trip that has become a personal touchstone.

“He said, ‘I never wanted anything but just to play music. And I knew it would either mean playing on the sidewalk or at Lincoln Center. And as long as it didn’t matter to me where it was going be, I knew I’d be making good music for the rest of my life.’ ”

So now that he’s a musician himself, Friedman says, he’s as happy playing for five people as he is playing for 500.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he says. “Wherever I go, I know we’re all going to get along.”

Friedman’s music has been described as “Hillbilly Leonard Cohen” but there are other ways to depict it. Imagine Chris Isaak with less ego and more grit. Imagine a male-fronted Cowboy Junkies where the deliberateness of the songs is less drowsy than world-weary.

People have remarked at how odd it is that such rural music could come from someone who has spent most of his life in New York City. But the music is equally urban. It is as evocative of Brooklyn melancholy as it is of Mississippi blues.

As if Friedman’s story isn’t already packed with improbability, he has a day job that he can do wherever his music takes him.

Like his mentor, Merkin, Friedman is one of the country’s major magazine illustrators. Run a Google image search on his name and you will find work that is instantly recognizable.

Call this vocation whatever you wish, just don’t call it a legitimate form of artistic expression.

“If my wife left me,” Friedman says, “I wouldn’t draw a portrait of Obama. I’d write a song.”

spen@jg.net