Santiago Michalek | Shared Memories

Santiago Michalek’s paintings of classic transportation tap universal emotions

By Norman Kolpas

This story was featured in the September 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

SANTIAGO MICHALEK was just 3 or 4 years old when he first discovered the power of art. “Every morning, my mom would give me a loaf of bread and the newspaper to take to Cirilo,” he says, referring to his grandpa, Eduardo “Cirilo” Michalek, who lived in his own house on the family’s property in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “And he would make us toast and warm milk for breakfast together.” Knowing his grandson loved horses, Cirilo would pull out the sports section from the morning paper and cut out all the pictures of horses from its racing coverage to give to young Santiago. Then, on blank sheets of paper, Cirilo drew horses with jockeys on them to delight his grandson. They were rudimentary images: “Just a horse with an eyeball and four triangle legs,” ridden by stick-figure “guys smoking cigars.” But to young Santiago, “they were the most amazing things. And watching this magic happen, I wanted to duplicate it.”

He began drawing obsessively. “I remember one day when I was 5 or 6, I was looking at my picture of a horse, and I’d drawn its belly”—a feature far more detailed than anything from Cirilo’s hand. “And I realized, Wow! I have surpassed the master.”

More than three decades later, Michalek creates masterly magic of his own. His large-scale oil paintings of vintage transportation, captured in a style at once uncannily realistic and charmingly impressionistic, achieve the impressive feat of tapping into our collective memories. “We feel a kinship to trucks, cars, planes, trains, and tractors,” he explains. “We care for and rebuild and grow to love them, tell stories about them, and have fond memories of them.”

DESPITE HIS early passion for drawing, Michalek took a circuitous route to the painting life he now wholeheartedly inhabits. “I knew what I wanted,” he says. “But how to get there was a complete mystery to me.” Not that his talent wasn’t recognized early. At Cherry Hill Elementary School in Orem, UT, where his father, a pediatrician, had moved the family when Santiago was 6, his second-grade teacher called the principal’s attention to the young boy who drew during lessons. Rather than disciplining him, the principal asked him if, every Thursday, he’d like to join the fifth-graders for art lessons from their teacher, who was an accomplished watercolorist. Michalek went on drawing and painting right through high school. Even as his activities grew to include swim team, drama, and playing guitar in a band, “after all that, every night, I would sit down in my room and draw and paint until 1 a.m.,” he says.

Michalek found most of his guidance in resources other than classes. “My best teachers were museums and books,” he recalls. Most inspiring of all were the works of the great American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell. Witnessing his paintings up close in a touring exhibition proved a revelation. “It was shocking to see the difference between his magazine covers and the actual paintings. The vibrancy, textures, and brushwork were a thousand times more impressive.” The young artist was particularly impressed by Rockwell’s “incredible ability to connect and share things that everybody can relate to, creating so many paintings that strike a chord with people.”

Though Michalek yearned to move people in the same way, he left high school unsure of how to proceed in his true calling. “For most professions, the path is very well laid out. But if you want to be an artist, well, good luck,” he says, echoing half-hearted advice he heard again and again.

He spent “not even a year” pursuing art in college, he says, “but it was blatantly obvious I was not going to find what I wanted there.” Newly married at 21 to his wife Elizabeth, and wanting to build a life together, he was looking for work and needed a car “that was really cheap. So, of course, I looked up a Volkswagen Bug on eBay.” To his amazement, a nicely restored one was selling for $15,000. “So I bought a different car,” he says.

Meanwhile, the thought took hold of restoring a Beetle for himself. He tracked down a drivable but beat-up one for $3,000, borrowed the money from his father, and checked out a library book on how to repair and restore it. “I fixed it up, made it prettier, sold it for $9,000, paid my dad back, and started looking for another,” he remembers. Over the next decade, eventually joined by his best friend, Michalek built a successful business restoring VW Beetles and Buses, sometimes selling them at auction for more than $100,000. “I loved doing it,” he says. “But it wasn’t my first love.”

In fact, he had continued to draw and paint every night of the week except Sundays. Every Saturday for a decade, he attended life-drawing sessions at the nearby Springville Museum of Art. A chance meeting there with another artist clued him in to the Bridge Academy in Provo, a private school formed by working artists who aimed to share their professional knowledge.

During the year and a half of evenings and weekends Michalek studied there, he grew more and more determined to leave auto restoration behind and devote himself full-time to art. He commemorated that decision in a self-portrait he titled IT’S TIME, showing his coverall-clad figure sitting in his shop.

By then, Michalek had begun adding to his repertoire of “portraits” of cars he’d restored. And he noticed an interesting phenomenon. “When people would see my figurative work, they would say things like, ‘I love the brushwork and color palette,’ and my ego was thoroughly stroked.” But for his automotive images, he received feedback of a different sort: “They went straight into talking about how the painting made them feel.” When Susan Meyer, curating director of Meyer Gallery in Park City, UT, opened a crate of paintings he’d sent for a Bridge Academy student show, Michalek recalls, “She said, ‘These are amazing. Do you want a show? I want to represent you.’”

AND SO IN January 2011, Michalek became a full-time fine artist. He now paints in a spacious studio with 12-foot ceilings attached to the home he and Elizabeth share with their daughter and two sons. It’s located in Highland, UT, in the foothills of the Wasatch Range, half an hour south of Salt Lake City. A prolific painter, he has expanded his subjects to embrace a wide range of vehicles, including locomotives, sports cars, fire trucks, motorcycles, ski gondolas, and seaplanes. He’ll even sometimes portray the horses he loved as a boy—though he now focuses on draft horses, including the one he bought two years ago and boards nearby, who’s featured in the recent painting APOLLO MAKES FRIENDS. “They are, after all, the original locomotion transportation. We refer to ‘horsepower’ for a reason,” he adds.

Regardless of the subject, Michalek follows a proven process for achieving paintings that connect strongly with viewers. “I’ll get an idea in my head of what I want to see,” he says. “I think of [the subject] as a portrait, with eyes, a nose, and a smile. Just as John Singer Sargent”—another idol of his—“accentuates aspects of somebody’s face to paint their better self, I want to tell the story of my subject in the most beautiful way possible.”

Then he’ll go through his extensive library of digital photos, using Photoshop to create a composite that includes just the right reflections on a windshield, or rust patterns in bodywork, or authentic accessories like a fog light on a VW Bus. Next, he’ll draw out the entire composition in pencil directly on the canvas and paint over it in a monochromatic value study using burnt umber, ultramarine blue, ultramarine violet, or phthalo turquoise.

Then, he says, “I’ll just pick areas and start painting, always trying to feed life into it. There’s a moment in every painting where it’s just color on a canvas and then, all of a sudden, it has a presence and a mood that are tangible; it’s looking back at you and has become alive.” Some larger works may take him as long as two months to complete, as he switches his attention to other canvases and then returns. “But sometimes I’ll paint one for 30 hours straight and finish it,” he notes.

Speaking of finishing, he always takes care to add one particular element before he considers a painting complete: the numbers “328,” which appear sometimes on a car’s license plate or a locomotive’s head number, sometimes more discretely on a burlap sack, hidden among chicken scratchings in the dirt, or as graffiti on a wall. “Since I was 10 years old,” he explains, “I’ve seen those numbers everywhere—on license plates, even on my clock when I woke up in the middle of the night. They’ve always been a sign that luck is on my side, that something good is going to happen.” Judging from the results of Michalek’s first decade as a full-time fine artist, those definitely appear to be winning numbers.

representation
Meyer Gallery, Park City, UT; Gallery MAR, Carmel, CA.

This story was featured in the September 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

MORE RESOURCES FOR ART COLLECTORS & ENTHUSIASTS
• Subscribe to Southwest Art magazine
• Learn how to paint & how to draw with downloads, videos & more
• Sign up for your Southwest Art email newsletter & download a FREE ebook