Michael Schultheis (Photo by Nancy LeVine / Copyright Michael Schultheis)
September 1, 2009
By Claire Sykes
Who hasn’t marveled at a nautilus shell, its calcium carbonate structure spiraling the shape of cyclones and galaxies? Or, what about the simple contour of that sugar cone topped with a sphere of your favorite ice cream?
Geometric forms fascinate Seattle painter Michael Schultheis. His scholarly background in math and economics, and former career as a Microsoft engineer in computer software development carried his love of mathematics from the conference room to the artist’s studio. Like chalkboards repeatedly scrawled on and erased, Michael’s canvases are layered with mathematical equations and drawings that depict the forms and motions of three-dimensional geometric shapes.
"Wings of Apollonius" 2009 acrylic on canvas 108" x 104" (Copyright Michael Schultheis)
Michael’s work has been exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Chase Gallery, Froelick Gallery (Portland) and Winston Wachter Fine Art (Seattle and New York City), among others. About two dozen corporate and public collections of his paintings include those at the National Academy of Sciences, City of Seattle, Four Seasons Olympic Hotel, M Financial Holdings, Inc. and The Mathematical Association of America.
“Wings of Apollonius,” Michael’s most current body of work, joins Oregon Native American Rick Bartow’s paintings, drawings and sculpture at Froelick Gallery, September 1-26, 2009.
Claire Sykes: Geometric forms, such as the parabola, ellipse, hyperbola, toroid and conic, drive your work. Why are you so drawn to them?
Michael Schultheis: I think it’s probably influenced by my interest in natural forms, like those in the garden or from wine in a glass—those that I come into contact with in my own physicality, my own moving through the world.
CS: The world you used to move through was the corporate one. What prompted you to leave that for the art world?
MS: At the end of our long meetings at Microsoft, the white boards would be filled with diagrams and notes. I took photographs of them before they were erased, because they offered this historical record of our thinking, allowing us to learn a great deal about our collective mindset. After a point, I started seeing the working out on the white boards as an expression, a framed composition like an artist’s canvas, rather than just a written record of analytical ideas. After eight years as a software engineer, in 2001, I left the profession to pursue art. I thought then, and I still do, that life is really temporary, and it’s important to follow my dream.
CS: What kind of art training and experience did you have, or get?
MS: It’s all self-taught. I never took classes. I tried pencil and paper, gouache, watercolors, printmaking and oils, and none of those worked. But acrylics did. I think partly because it dries so quickly, so I can more easily put the layers down. I was going for the look and feel of a chalkboard, the ghost chalk, the memory of earlier ideas.
CS: How do you create your paintings?
MS: I start with my interest in a mathematical topic, like conics, and do the research. I want to learn what others have thought and discovered about the topic. I apply the first layer of paint with a delicate Japanese calligraphy brush, starting in the top left-hand corner and progressing down to the bottom right-hand corner, filling the canvas with equations. Then, using a large brush, I rub out part of them. For the second layer, with a fine brush I limn the image into the area I rubbed out. Then something happens that causes me to see a variation on, or relationship to, the current form, and I follow this impulse. Using a palette knife, an Exacto-knife or large chisel, I scrape the paint surface and pull out the new image, and often I’ll use my hands to sculpt the paint into a prominent line. Then, for the third step, I use a rag to rub away previous forms, and spray water onto the canvas to wash away all the previous color except that which adheres to the limned outlines. For hours and hours I live in this third step. And then I repeat all three—revising equations with the Japanese calligraphy brush, rubbing out an area and drawing and redrawing new ideas.
"Folium Coronation 01" 2009 acrylic on canvas 48" x 48" (Copyright Michael Schultheis)
CS: You term your art “analytical expressionism,” which you define as “the creative human capacity to visualize and express analytical thought.” What do you mean by this?
MS: We humans have a fascinating capacity to visualize analytical concepts like mathematics, and then write them down in a language, a notation, that we can share with others. The process of visually rendering these creative ideas is what I call “analytical expressionism.” I show viewers, on canvas, what the process of thinking about math looks like to me.
CS: What’s happening in your head while you paint?
MS: It’s a magical experience, when my ideas communicate with those original ones from other mathematicians, like Apollonius. The earlier, deeper layers of the canvas look like they’re way in the distant, and they’re interacting, visually, with my own ideas. It’s this conversation, as I resurrect these ideas from their graves and let them talk again. As I’m building up layers upon layers, I get further away from what is known and more into what is unknown, and it becomes this total exploration for me. What’s really curious is that sometimes I come up with new geometry based on my geometric forms interacting with the original geometric forms. It’s not just dry math. It’s hugely imbued with symbolic significance for me.
CS: Can you give an example of this new geometry and its symbolic significance in your latest body of work, “Wings of Apollonius?”
MS: These paintings are based on Apollonius’s work on the conic sections, an hourglass shape. Humans bring to this shape the idea of the impermanence of time and mortality. The hourglass shape can also be mapped out, geometrically, in the amount of sand above and below, and the size of the aperture.
Another way of looking at the conic is if you take a wine goblet and hold it vertical, the wine maps out a circle. If you tilt it, it’s an ellipse. If you tilt it with the wine glass covered so it doesn’t spill, it’s a hyperbola. And if you let it spill, it’s a parabola. So at a dinner party, all of that’s on my mind. This body of work is primarily about the ellipse inside that wine glass. Apollonius showed me the geometric forms within the translucent conic. That geometry changes as you twirl the glass. If you hold the glass steady and the ellipse rotates around it, it’s a heliotrope, like maple seeds whirling as they fall. It’s an amazing visual experience to play with that geometry, as it twirls up and down in the double conic. A duality exists for the ascending and descending movement, the positive and the negative, the converging and diverging, infinity and negative infinity, the heliotrope and its shadow. These different topics come up for me while I’m exploring these geometries. A lot of what I’m interested in is imbuing the geometry with my own symbolism. It brings it to life for me.
CS: You’ve talked about how you experience your work. How do you want others to?
MS: With an open mind. I also hope that the fact that there’s math in my work doesn’t repel those who were so frustrated by math. Instead, I hope they embrace their own “inner mathematician” as much as it’s been challenged before. But most of all, I want people to just be open to whatever comes up for them.
"Wings of Apollonius 04" 2009 acrylic on canvas 48" x 72" (Copyright Michael Schultheis)
© by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
