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Spraygraphic Interview with Artist Michael Tole
By Spraygraphic | March 21, 2008
Spraygraphic Interview with Michael Tole
SG: Please tell us about yourself?
MT: I’m a fairly ordinary 28 year old Texan. My BFA is from the University of Texas at Austin. I was lucky enough to be picked up by a gallery a year after graduation, so I never got my MFA. I may come to regret that if I ever want the insurance and retirement plans that make college jobs so appealing, but for now I’m okay. After graduating, I taught high school for six years (never again), then I quit to make art full time. I work in my studio Monday through Friday, 8-4. I have been happily married for four years, and we are expecting our first child. My wife teaches high school English at a local Catholic school. I am lucky enough to have made enough money the past couple of years to continue making art “full time” for the foreseeable future. My work has just begun to be noticed outside of the Dallas area.
SG: Where do you currently live and work?
MT: I live in an older suburb of Dallas, Texas. My studio is in Dallas.
SG: What mediums do you work with?
MT: For the past several years I have worked exclusively in oil.
SG: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
MT: I always have an eye out for unusual places and things. When I come across a place that catches my eye, I get out my camera and photograph. Depending on the subject matter, I will sometimes jiggle the camera to produce shadow images and double images in the resulting photos. When I’m lucky, this adds complexity and interest, but it usually just makes a mess. I also do a lot of cropping of my photos. When I’m happy with a photo, I do a painstaking painting of it. I paint in one layer which creates a luminous surface that lets the light of the ground come through the mostly transparent pigments I use. The result often looks very little like the original object, though I make a point of being as faithful to the photograph as possible.
SG: What kind of things do you do when you get blocked or find it hard to create something?
MT: I take a break, and I begin working on any idea I come up with until one works, or leads into something that does. I find the harder I try, the less successful the work is. You can’t force it.
SG: Where are you currently finding your inspiration?
MT: I’m currently interested in consumer goods that have clearly defined class associations, high or low. I then transform it into a new product that exists independent of the original subject matter.
SG: Can you please tell us a little about your decision to paint Eggs. What kind of models did you use to paint them. How long does one painting generally take you to complete?
MT: I found these Faberge Egg reproductions in local shopping mall and that is the setting in which I photographed them. For some reason I like to photograph my subjects in the environment in which I find them. I would never bring them home and set them up. Their original context is important.
Although I haven’t the money or desire to buy these pricey trinkets, I find them intriguing both visually and for what they represent as consumer objects and signs of class. I find the fact that successful American capitalists buy reproductions of symbols of European Feudal power as symbols of their own success contradictory, but also strangely telling about the truth of the “American Dream.” I then transform their likeness, through a digital medium, then back into painting (a traditionally elite European art form like the eggs themselves), and finally creating a new consumer product for an even more elite clients. The final painting is even more Rococco than the original egg.
As for time, Blue Egg took six 40 hour weeks to paint. That’s typical for that size. The smaller paintings take 2-4 weeks. My prices are slowly creeping up, but until recently, I’ve been making far less than minimum wage. The only difference between me and a sixteen year old Chinese factory worker is that I’m self employed.
SG: Can you please share with us about Blue Egg and the awards it has recently received.
MT: I’m very honored to have been shortlisted for the LICC. I think it will be good exposure for my work. When I entered I told my wife that it didn’t matter if I won, I was most interested in having all those curators and critics on the jury see the work. But it’s always nice to receive official affirmation.
Blue Egg is one of the most recent paintings in the Faberge series and is a slight departure from its’ antecedents as it is all foreground and no background. I love how completely it, and some of the other egg paintings depart from the original objects. A delivery man stopped by my studio one day and asked me what symphony hall I was painting. When I told him it was an upclose shot of a Faberge Egg, he was dumbfounded.
SG: Can you please tell us a little about your exhibition, Some Queer Noisy Pendulum (The Faberge Paintings) at the Conduit Gallery in Texas.
MT: I was very pleased with the show. I felt that it was a solid, cohesive body of work, and coming close on the heels of the Hunting Art Prize, it got a lot of attention. It was populated by a year’s worth of the Faberge Egg paintings. I would like to think that I took a theme and pushed it to opposite extremes with some of the paintings in sharp, garish focus, and others so blurry and dense with color and curlycues that they almost looked abstract. The show got reviewed in several local papers. I was exceptionally pleased when it was reviewed in the September 2007 issue of Art Forum. It got an amazingly positive response from everyone who saw it, critics, collectors, and artists. I was even asked for autographs, which I found a bit funny. I had to go in for three or four different photo shoots for various publications which my wife found hilarious because I always look like Golum in photographs. I just can’t smile on cue, and I don’t consider myself particularly attractive. It was like being the most famous person no one has ever heard of…for a month. You can see most of the work from that show on my website.
SG: Can you please tell us about your experience winning the Hunting Art Prize of $50,000 cash. In what ways has that had an impact on your life and your art?
MT: My painting, Untitled(Woman), won the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize of Houston, TX in April of 2007. It was the first painting in the egg series and the only reason I entered it was because there was no application fee and I figured I had nothing to lose. The whole contest was judged on one painting, and finalists had to ship the actual work to Houston for the final round of judging. I never thought I’d actually win. I got excited when I found out I was a finalist, but got bummed when I found out there were 100 others. I almost didn’t pay the money to ship the painting to Houston because I thought my chances were so slim. I was blown away when they announced that I was the winner. When I got to the podium, I didn’t have anything to say because I had intentionally barred myself from imagining a scenario in which I might win for fear of being disappointed. It was a great confirmation that my wife and I had made the right decision in my career change. It was a real high. We would have been financially okay without the prize, but it made our lives much more comfortable.
My wife and I paid off our student loans and put a down payment on a house with the prize money. I also reinvested a lot of it into my business, paying two years studio rent in advance, buying materials, etc. I’d like to say I spent it on hookers and cocaine, but I’m just not that exciting.
I will say that winning a big award can mess with your head a bit. It’s extremely gratifying, but I also felt the immediate need to top the winning painting, and it sent me into a bit of a depression afterward, but I got over it. The most important thing is to keep making work. I realized I’d never get past that one painting if I fixated on having to beat it. Not everything can win a $50,000 prize, and that’s okay. The hardest part is that everyone now wants an Egg Painting and I can’t keep up with the demand.
SG: Where has your work been seen?
MT: My work has been seen in Conduit Gallery, Red Dot Miami, and in the Kimbell Museum of Art (for three hours anyway).
SG: Where will it be seen next?
MT: I’m in a group show at Gallery 10G in NYC opening January 17th, 2008. That same gallery is taking a couple of Egg paintings to Scope New York. I’m also in an upcoming group show at MMgalleries in San Francisco this coming December.
SG: What is your dream art assignment?
MT: I’m kind of living it. I paint 40 hours a week. My work is selling as fast as I can paint it (knock on wood). I make enough money to live (though not much more). I do feel some market pressure since my livelihood depends entirely on my art, but that’s what makes great art. I sometimes fantasize about what art I’d make if no one were watching, but without an audience, making art is masturbatory. It’s important to follow your interests, but you also have to make it relevant to the broader world if you want it to take interest. Every successful artist in history has had to deal with the interface of personal interest with the interests of their audience/patrons.
SG: What is your favorite color?
MT: I couldn’t choose. They’re all good when used in the proper place.
SG: Who is your favorite artist? And Why?
MT: That’s always the hardest question. My favorites are changing as we speak. All the artists I once hated I’m beginning to like. That seems to be a trend in my work. In both influence and subject matter, I always seem to find more of interest in things I’m not naturally fond of. That being said my taste is turning to, Rubens, Fragonard, Wtewael, even Eric Fischl, at least a little. Favorites used to be Rembrandt, The Ab Ex artists, and Richter. If I had to choose a favorite for this week, I’d choose Wtewael.
SG: What book/magazine are you reading this week?
MT: l, aside from the usual art books and magazines, I just finished The Three Musketeers. It’s not exactly the most profound book, but it was entertaining. I’m going through a phase where I’m reading or rereading the classics. My wife’s an English teacher, and I feel I need to keep up with her. Not all classics are good, however. Ivanhoe is a snooze, and Moby Dick would be good if it were edited down by half (especially removing anything having to do with the physical structures of the whale, it’s scientific classification, or examples of whaling in history), and if Melville didn’t explain his own metaphors. If you just kept the basic character and plot development, it would be a good book. One book I can’t recommend highly enough is Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. It’s unbelievably good. I’ve read it three times in the past year. It’s a book about a liar who seduces himself into believing his own falsehoods, and then has to find meaning in life when they crumble.
SG: Ever do a self portrait? Where is it now?
MT: Only in art school. My mother probably has it somewhere.
SG: Where is your favorite place to hang out?
MT: At home with my wife. Sorry, I’m pretty boring.
SG: Any final words of advice?
MT: I’m still a very young artist, and I feel my advice would be of little value to most artists, so I’ll address myself to those fresh out of school:
Don’t try to figure out what your work means first and then try to make it. It will be still born. The poison of art school is the idea that you have to know what it all means. Just start making something. The first few things you make will suck, but in the process of making them, you will begin to find what really interests you, rather than what you think SHOULD interest you. My current body of work began with a polaroid photo of a friend’s apartment. It’s an organic process based more on trial and error than theory. Theory describes and explains, it isn’t causal.
Also, although the most important thing to succeeding as an artist is making good work, that’s only 50% of the profession. The other half is meeting people, making the right connections, and getting your work seen. Enter competitions, network, go to art fairs and shamelessly self promote. Finding friends to help you is a must. Likewise, be willing to help others. Printing color catalogs and post cards is expensive, but so worth it because you can give them to anyone who is willing to talk to you. They will lose your business card before they get home. They will forget your web address before they get to a computer. They’ll definitely forget your name, but if you have images to hand them at the moment of your meeting they have to at least glance at your work. It has worked for me
Additional Links:
http://www.re-title.com/artists/Michael-Tole.asp
ART: 1. Untitled (five eggs), 2. Untitled (egg base), 3. Untitled (pearls), 4. Untitled (large reflection), 5. Untitled (streaks), 6. Untitled (blue egg), 7. Untitled (woman)
Topics: Artist Interviews, Paintings |
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