Below is an interview with SORA instructor and professional artist, Mike Chelich. Mike has taught at SORA since its founding in 1992. Mike and SORA director, Bruno Surdo, both studied at Atelier Lack in Minneapolis in the early 80s. In addition to teaching at SORA, Mike has an active commissioned art and portrait painting practice. Mike discusses his art educational background at Chicago’s American Academy of Art and Atelier Lack in Minneapolis, his teaching experience at SORA and his reflections about his own work. –Ben Rathbone

Click here for Mike’s bio
Click here for Mike’s personal website

BR: Can you tell me about your background. How and when did you decide you wanted to be an artist?

Mike: Since I was very young, probably four or five years old, I had been doing art. I had an interest in all sorts of things as most boys do, dinosaurs, superheros and comic books. I had an interest in anatomy even as a little kid and was putting blood vessels on dinosaurs. I knew that I wanted to be an artist early, especially a comic book artist. In adition, I also loved wildlife and the natural world. When I got into high school, I saw the work of a wildlife artist named Charles Frace. After I saw his work, I knew I wanted to be serious about becoming a wildlife artist. That was in early high school. So that was the formation of my interests in art.

BR: When did you graduate high school and what did you do after that?

Mike: I graduated from high school in 1982. Leading up to that time, I was a little aimless. I put off even applying to college so lets just say I was very fortunate in the way things happened. I tried for a scholarship contest to the American Academy of Art in Chicago where you had to draw for 6 hours, and then submit your work. I did that and won a tuition scholarship. That pretty much decided it. I was interested in the American Academy, anyway, so that sealed the deal.

BR: What was the scholarship contest like?

Mike: What you had to do was come in and draw a still life for three hours in the morning, and then an additional 3 hours in the afternoon from the model. As I was a disorganized high school kid, I got up and did not know the exact train schedule. I ended up being late for the train that would have gotten me there on time. So I think I showed up about half an hour late to the contest. I had two and a half hours to draw and I was in a panic while I was working on the still life. By lunchtime, I had settled down a little and had the opportunity to draw from the live model along with other potential students. I was notified several months later that I got the scholarship.

BR: When you attended the American Academy, what was the training and instruction like?

Mike: I thought the training was excellent. The school was primarily set up for commercial art, although it did have a fine arts program for watercolor and oil painting. The first year, everyone had to go through fundamentals and life drawing. The second year I did watercolor and life drawing again. I had the benefit of excellent teachers. Fred Berger was my biggest influence at the Academy and continued to be so afterwards. Fred was excellent with figure drawing. composition, perspective, and expression, all very important aspects of art. Another teacher was Robert Krajecki. He was the fundamentals teacher, and something of a sergeant of a teacher … very tough. You had to learn how to get information from him. He never wanted you to come up and ask, “Whats wrong with my picture?”. He wanted you to look over your drawing first and think about where you thought the problems were and after that, ask ‘Is there a problem here?’ or ‘I’m not comfortable with how this area balances out, do you see anything I could do with this area?’ He would want you to think first. So that was very important. He was also strict with deadlines, which was preparation for the modern world of getting jobs and commercial work. He introduced us to important aspects of composition, perspective, and design. So we got a lot of variety at the school in terms of trying different mediums and different aspects of art fundamentals such as design, composition, color, perspective and drawing. All of these were taught in Krajecki’s fundamentals course.

I also worked with Irving Shapiro, the watercolor teacher. Even though watercolor was never a major interest of mine, I learned a lot about composition through his influence. I stayed on a second year at the American Academy because I won another scholarship at the Academy for a second year and wanted to take advantage of it. After that Bruno and I had found out about the school up in Minnesota so we both traveled there after our first year of school at the American Academy.

BR: Bruno mentioned that you were the one that found out about Atelier Lack for the first time. How did you find out about it?

Mike: I was at a place called Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana, outside of West Lafayette, near the Purdue University campus. At Wolf Park, they did research on wolf behavior. I stayed there for the summer, and took care of six wolf pups. I was drawing from animals, learning about their behavior and trying to incorporate my knowledge of their behavior into my work. At that point in time, I still wanted to be a wildlife artist. In any case, I learned about Wolf Park in my junior year in high school. The man who ran Wolf Park, Dr. Eric Klinghammer, was the brother-in-law of Richard Lack and they had in their possession a pamphlet of Richard’s entitled, “On the Training of Painters.” Eric’s daughter Kirstin gave me the pamphlet. They also had several paintings of Lack’s in their residence so I had the opportunity to see Lack’s paintings. I admired his artwork very much. I then read the pamphlet about his Atelier and was very impressed by the curriculum. I felt that this is how artists should be trained. It had that old school feel. I always deeply admired the art of the Old Masters and the curriculum felt right. So I kept the information but I did not make an effort to pursue it immediately after high school.

I later talked to Fred Berger, my life drawing teacher at the Academy, about this school and showed him the pamphlet and examples of the artwork that was done by artists graduating from Lack’s program. Fred read through the pamphlet and highly recommended that I go check it out. I did not know Bruno at the time. Apparently Bruno and Fred were having conversations about Bruno’s interests in figurative art and fine art in general as Fred and I were. So Fred put Bruno and I in contact with each other.

BR: Is it fair to say, it seems like you were going along and focused on wildlife art, and after you got into contact with Fred, he expanded your perspective and motivated you and Bruno, in a lot of ways to connect with this grander tradition of art and seek out this kind of training, is that accurate?

Mike: Yes, pretty much. I had interests in figurative and wildlife art before I went to the American Academy. I had an interest in allegorical artwork and was actually doing just a little of that type of work before I went to school, but I was not very serious about it. When I saw Fred’s work, I immediately realized that this was the man that I wanted to study under. It was almost like I was going in a certain direction and he was already there. He was the one that was building it. In terms of imagination, and especially with his knowledge of anatomy and composition, he was already there. Fred’s own artistic development and training was a great deal different than Lack’s. Where Lack learned the tradition through his experience with Gammell, Fred had to learn it on his own.

BR: What was it like when you and Bruno went up to visit Atelier Lack?

Mike: We both flew up to Minneapolis. It was a cold day up there, very bland. I don’t know how Bruno felt, but my heart sank a little when we arrived in Minneapolis to see the school. The school had all gray walls. So I think my initial experience of the whole thing was a little, I don’t know if I want to say depressing, but it certainly wasn’t the grand horizon I thought it was going to be, just in that first impression. Worse than that, both Bruno and I were not seeing any young women of our age in the city. But that was very much just one days experience. The weather was just gray, the walls were gray … Blah. The one thing that you had to be impressed by was the cast drawing and paintings they had there. The work was impressive in terms of the realism they were capturing. It was a very disciplined environment, you could see that. And we had our opportunity to meet with Lack, and actually see some color on the walls of his studio, outside the gray walls of the student experience. We got to see more inspirational work coming from Richard Lack himself. That certainly made it a much more pleasant experience.

BR: When you first moved to Minneapolis, what was it like living there? Was it your first experience living away from home? Outside Indiana?

Mike: I enjoyed it very much. Minneapolis reminded me of the suburbs in the city. I just enjoyed Minneapolis a great deal. It was not the first time I had been on my own and I took to it like a duck to water with no problem. I lived on campus at the University of Minnesota because I did not want to be around art people all the time. I wanted to be around people who were doing other things, because that is how I felt a person should be. If you experience other things, you bring more into your art.

BR: What years did you study there, and which instructors did you work closely with. What was it like?

Mike: I was there from 1984 to 1988. Dale Redpath, Don Koestner, and Steve Gjertson were all teachers there. All had trained under Richard Lack, so it was basically Lack’s instruction, whether it was coming from Lack or not. Having said that, a lot of my influence would have been from Dale Redpath. She was there the most, twice a week, and she was tough and never let up. I’m thankful for it. Lack himself would introduce us to additional and more advanced information, while simultaneously reinforcing exactly what Dale was saying. Lack brought a lot more to the table as a result of his longer experience. But you know, there is only so much you can absorb while you are still struggling with the basics. You can learn a great deal from a teacher like Dale who drills the basics on a day to day basis. Because of his broader experience, Lack would have more to offer a student but so much of your time at school was involved with the mastery of the “simpler” challenges. At least, thats how I experienced it.

BR: When you say Dale she was tough, in what respect?

Mike: Critiques. The critiques were always tough. She was very insistent about procedure. She would never let you worry about values before your shapes, or color before your values. Her critiques were always on the money. She was very good about the methods, about carrying through with procedure correctly, about craftsmanship, the whole thing.

BR: Can you describe the lineage of painters that SORA and Atelier Lack connect to?

Mike: Richard Lack was part of the lineage of trained painters that stretched back to the time of the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. David had a workshop or apprenticeship system. I don’t know if he had necessarily a formal Atelier. He trained several painters during including Ingres and Gros. A man named Paul Delaroche was a student of Gros, and would be the instructor of Jean-Leon Gerome. Gerome was a French painter as well, and very much of a scientific realist in terms of the style and the way he depicted things. Gerome trained a group of American painters who came from Boston. There were several painters throughout France who were training artists from all over Europe and the United States.

There were a group of artists from Boston who went over to study art in France. The only names I can remember were Edmund Tarbell, Dennis Miller Bunker, Frank Benson, and William Paxton. Paxton and Bunker trained with Gerome. Again it was not necessarily a total four year experience for those artists but they did pick up a great deal about painting and drawing from their experience there. In any case, they continued their practice in Boston after returning from Europe. Paxton, being the yougest of the group of artists from Boston, went over later than the rest of the painters. He was the man who trained Richard Lack’s teacher, R. H. Ives Gammell. Gammell was an important figure for people who have come from our lineage because without him, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Gammell himself did not receive the same exact type of training that we have here at SORA or that Lack had at his school. Gammell’s training was the result of his studying under several members of the Boston 10 (as they were called) in addition to the time he spent with Paxton. The older Paxton happened upon a chance meeting with with Gammell while the young man was painting on the docks. The two talked for some time and Paxton believed that he could help develope Gammell’s drawing and painting skills. Over several years, the two had continuing correspondence. Paxton would give Gammell assignments which were critiqued on a regular basis. Paxton reintroduced Gammell to the importance of mastering the fundamentals of drawing before even laying hands on a brush. For the most part Gammell had been painting without a solid foundation in drawing He had to make up for that in his later years through Paxton’s training.

So it was Gammell who put together the whole package of training that we offer at SORA, as a result of his own experience and research into the Ateliers in Paris. He was the one that put that system together in the U.S. Fortunately, the young Richard Lack met a student of Gammell’s while painting a copy at the Boston Art Museum. He made arrangements to visit Gammell at his studio. Lack was accepted into Gammell’s studio and studied there. And then of course, several decades later, Bruno and I came to meet Lack and study at his school.

It should also be noted that the lineage that descended from David had a major emphasis in academic realism with its analytical approach to drawing and painting. In the late 19th century, the influence of impressionism was brought into this tradition by Dennis Miller Bunker. Bunker was a Boston School painter and had worked side by side with John Singer Sergent for a time. The two admired each other’s work quite a bit, and they both influenced each other’s art. It’s not like they were all meeting together and deciding to inject this impressionism into the tradition. It was just that they saw impressionism as another approach to painting that they wanted to experiment with. Many artists of that time throughout the world were also experimenting with impressionism, so it seemed to be a natural development in the academic tradition of painting. Impressionistic color is something we would like to think we might be able to continue in our own school. We probably don’t do it as well as Lack was doing, but we do introduce the student to it.

BR: What was the plan at the time, in your mind, for what you would do next, after school?

Mike: I was still loosely thinking I would use all of this for wildlife art. As time went on, I started considering the life of a
wildlife artist and the amount of time that would have to be spent traveling. I did not know if that was the type of life I wanted. I wanted a family. I was consciously thinking this at school, so I started thinking about different goals, in terms of being an artist. I thought it was really important for me to learn how to do portraiture well because that was and still tends to be the most lucrative way of making your living as an artist. It was never what I wanted to be, but it was something I
looked at realistically I came to believe that I needed to have myself go through the experience of portraiture and get some degree of competence or mastery over it. Many of the goals that were important to me where already in Lack’s program, such as mastering the whole approach to painting, training my eye to see color accurately, developing myself so that I could draw and paint the human figure well. I still had my eye and interest on doing allegorical figurative work. That was a big goal that I wanted to work towards. So I got as much information as I could about the craft of painting, and the development of my eye to see nature accurately from Atelier Lack but I would have to say the important aspects about composition and expression of ideas, and also expressing emotions within a picture, were developed from my experience with Fred Berger.

BR: What did you do right after graduating from Atelier Lack?

Mike: As soon as I got out, I got into a studio immediately. Bruno and I talked about that. We both believed that getting
into a studio as soon as possible to start painting was extremely important. We had seen too many artists who let themselves flounder once they got out of school. Most of those people just never got established.

It’s extremely important to get yourself going, get set up and get serious, even if you are not putting paintings up for sale. Getting yourself a studio, committing yourself to a schedule, and staying committed to it are very important goals. If you need to work part time to support yourself, you do it. And thats what I did. I worked at a framing shop and coached diving during that time. I did that for about 1 or 2 years, and then started teaching lessons in my studio. Eventually, I was able
to drop the framing and coaching because I was making more money teaching private lessons. Fortunately, Bruno opened SORA and brought me on board right at his new school. I taught at SORA once a month at the time.

BR: Can you describe the SORA composition program?

Mike: The SORA composition program was developed as a result of our experience at the American Academy as well as my own study of different types of compositions in old master paintings. There are qualities that you see repeated often in those paintings. The more and more I studied, the more I realized some of the best compositions were simplified in some way, or they had line work or large shapes holding them together. In one picture you might see a complicated multifigure composition with a large shape, such as a triangle, serving as the foundation of the piece. In another painting, diagonals would be running throughout a painting on which an artist would hang their visual imagery. The Baroque painters of the 17th century used this scheme of repetitous diagonals in many of their works. I started noticing these types of things in many artists’ work. Its not like you see these things repeated in every artist’s painting, but I was seeing an awful lot of it. When we first started composition classes in SORA’s early years, Bruno and I were having students work from an idea. We would give them a word or an idea, and then have everybody develop a composition from that idea. We started with simple concepts, like “liberty” or “transition” and had students develop compositions from that word. Unfortunately, we found
that we were getting into a lot of arguments from the students about what they believed their interpretation was as opposed to our reflections on how their concepts were communicating from the point of view of a visual narrative. Some suggested we were imposing our own interpretation on their concepts. Many times, the mistakes were with design fundamentals, such as a lack of a center of interest or no balance or repetition. Our critiques of these flaws were being misconstrued as criticisms of their personal expression of the idea or message they were trying to put forth. So we decided to make a change in the program. Instead, we created assignments that dealt with structural elements. If a student had an idea they wished to portray, they could work that idea into the framework of the exercise. Examples would be composing within a circular composition, a diagonal composition or a triangular composition. Whatever the subject, the image had to fit within the given format of the assignment.

We developed a program where we would take students through the basics of composing with a foreground, middle ground, and background, with a single light source, and start them off with some simple principles, like center of interest, balance, and variety of proportion, repetition … etc. After they had mastered that, we added more elements and principles to incorporate into their assignments. With each new assignment, the student tries a different structural exercise. Both Bruno and I feel that a working knowledge of composition is absolutely critical to the success of the student once they leave SORA. We saw in our own experience at school that those students who did not have composition in their background just failed.

BR: Failed how so?

Mike: They weren’t painting, and they did not know how to put a picture together. When they tried to put one together, they did it unsuccessfully. Also, a well-composed picture has a much better chance of selling. So you’re dealing with competition, and its hard to compete when you don’t know how to do compose. We had that experience of composing at
the American academy and our experience with Fred was extremely valuable. The experience we had with Lack was helpful as well. Our intent is to make sure the student has that experience from day one. We believe it is just as important as drawing. Students at SORA will use this experience through their three years so that in their fourth year, they could possibly come up with their own figurative composition, using their experience to develop a composition from start to finish. That was the whole purpose of the composition program, if you have the opportunity to work with someone that has been through it, you take advantage of that. Too many students are foolish about not taking advantage of the composition program.

BR: What do you feel is unique about the training a person receives at SORA?

Mike: I would say that what is unique about our school, which is what was unique about Lack’s school, is that you have the opportunity to work a long time on one project and to develop it to your highest potential under the guidance of well trained and experienced artists. You are being taught the proper procedure, how to develop your eye to see nature with accuracy, how to craft a painting, how to compose etcetra, etcetra. I think that the time that you are allowed to finish a project is also very important. A student also has their own cube space in which to work. So those things are unique. Also,the fact that it is a small school allows the teachers the time to give individualized instruction. You also have a group of students whose goals are all similar. They all want to be in the fine arts and have a common goal of wanting to be trained in this tradition.

I also think its unique that we have this lineage, whose importance I understand a great deal more as an older person than I did as a younger person. The fact that we are handing down this traditional art form to another generation, a form that has been practiced for several hundred years now, puts a great deal of obligation on the teacher. It makes you motivated to do your best as a teacher when you realize you are passing something important on to someone else. In addition, I think that Bruno and I feel we have made an important addition to the program with the composition program. We have also brought the quick-sketch and comparative drawing into the school. It’s not an emphasis at SORA, but we believe it serves as an important balance to bring the quick sketches in along with comparative drawing from the live model. Sight-size drawing, which is taught here with the casts and sustained semester-long figure drawings, can cause you to develop into an artist who draws the figure very stiffly. It can cause a student’s figures to look more like statues than living people. That is a danger and we’ve seen it happen. Both Bruno and I have been wary about that, even in our own work. It’s a real challenge. If the only type of training that you are doing is the sight size, it can happen.We believe very strongly in the importance of sight-size, but it needs balance.

Another very important another feature about the school is the emphasis on working from natural light as opposed to photographs. The reason for this preference is that natural light gives the opportunity to develop in the artist the ability to capture a fuller range of value gradations and spectrum of colors. With proper training, an artist can develope a greater sensitivity to the color vibrance in the natural world and the ability to capture those beautiful qualities in their paintings.

BR: Do you have any interesting stories about teaching at SORA?

Mike: I’m not sure if I would say interesting. I think that what I have enjoyed is watching new students with little
talent or experience who, through just through sheer determination, work very hard and develop into very decent draftsmen and painters. Thats a nice surprise and I’m especially glad for them when I see it. Another thing is when you do have extremely talented people, we find its harder for them to be disciplined than the people who aren’t as talented. I’m also excited to see a student, who is introduced to new information, execute the task and then take it further and improve upon the suggestions we make and add more to the painting from their own imagination and acquired skill. That is always very pleasant when you actually see people taking your information and running with it.

BR: What are the highlights of your own career as an artist?

Mike: I would have to say first that the creation of a several paintings were the highlight of my career. There were three figurative paintings that I’ve done which were certainly works that I enjoyed creating. Upon completing each of these works, I felt that I had carried out my vision for them fairly successfully. The first would be the religious piece that I did, ‘Christ washing Peter’s feet.’ That was my first figurative commission. After that I completed a large painting, ‘Monolith’, which is 11 by 14 feet. That took about a year and 4 months to complete. That was certainly a highlight of my career. Another painting that I did many years later called ‘Of God, Humanity, and Creation,’ was also a highlight. Those 3 paintings were the types of figurative paintings that I had always wanted to do and were certainly highlights of my artistic expression.

In terms of achievements, I’ve had the opportunity to paint the portraits of several important officials including two governors of Indiana, (Governor Bayh and Governor O’bannon) and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. I got to dine with the Senator along with a group of other guests. In addition, Senator Lugar graced us as a personal guide of the US Capitol. That will always be a highlight in my life. Another highlight would have to be the one man show I had at the Newington Cropsey Foundation, which is a gallery/museum in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Each year they host realist painters in the classical tradition and it was a great honor to have been a featured artist. You are treated like a king when you exhibit there and it was definitely one of my fondest memories.

BR: In terms of your own work, what motivates you and inspires you?

Mike: I am inspired by the beauty and complexity of nature. I am also inspired by the artworks of beauty and creativity created by past and contemporary generations of artists. Being raised as an athlete, I guess a competitive nature also motivates me. And, as I said before, I am also motivated to communicate through the language of the visual narrative most often exhibited in figurative work. I like the realm of ideas. I enjoy the challenge of expressing ideas through the use of gestural figurative interactions while using composition in an expressive way to bring those ideas out. Those are things that I certainly love to do with the figure.

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