Michael Young’s art: some regionalism, more WTF

Like many artists, painter Michael Young has moved through several periods: dark, semiabstract, aliens. Now, though, he can be said to have begun a new one: the sold-out period. Collectors are buying works by the Kansas City, Kansas, native as fast as he can produce them — sometimes sight unseen. Todd Weiner, in whose gallery Young opened his latest show, Inner Outer Limits, on June 5, says he has sold more of Young’s paintings than any of his other artists’ works. (There’s apparently a fellow in Ecuador who’s way into Young.)

The appeal is obvious enough. Part Hieronymus Bosch, part Mad magazine, his busy, colorful images dare you to spot every odd, unnerving, witty detail. His use of perspective and scale gives the pieces assembled at Todd Weiner Gallery a tinge of the surreal, visible most strikingly in “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead,” which re-imagines a Wizard of Oz tableau as a place somewhere over a dystopian rainbow. But Young’s style also shows, in its fluidity and smoothness, the influences of Art Deco and regionalism. Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” subjects even appear in one of his works.

Young’s earlier phases showcase those influences, tracing his journey from commercial art (which he studied in Salina as a young man) to architectural illustration (his first KC gig) to his 1978 arrival in New York, where he learned to render human anatomy with mentor Bill Weltman and studied at the Art Students League. It has been a journey there and back, with other stops along the way, but his art has matured into something fantastical and fervid, while Young has learned to think less.

“In the last five years or so, I’m more just having at it,” he says. “I’ll know the biggest pattern and then just work it out as I go. It’s more fun but frustrating, too.”

During a visit to his studio, Young answered The Pitch‘s questions about what’s fun and what’s frustrating.

The Pitch: How would you describe your work?

Young: I would describe it as stylized realism. Black comedy.

So not surrealism?

Or stylized surrealism. That way, I’m not trying to make things look like it’s actually a photograph, where some people do. It still looks like a painting.

Where do your ideas come from?

My dad [also an artist] claims I got the artistic side from him. My mom claims I got the literal side from her. It was always easy to come up with ideas, since I was real young. I’ve worked with people before who would say, “I have no idea what to paint. I want to paint, but I don’t know what to paint,” and I feel so sorry for them. Life’s not fair in that regard. It’s just strange. I’m glad I got the literal side.

A lot of your paintings include landscapes or some sort of architectural space. How did your background as an architectural illustrator affect how you conceptualize space?

It teaches you — forces you in your head — to understand light, shade, shadow and backlighting, so you can just draw whatever and know how to do it in your head instead of taking a picture or using a model. It’s internal now. And it helped me understand how perspective works. You can have the rising line in the picture, out of the picture, down there, out there. It helped me with trees and foliage, scale. You can see that my work now is a little looser. In the earlier years, I can show you things that were so, so tight. But I gradually, gradually changed over the years.

“Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” reminds me of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” because you have so many elements, and you can tell that each one has its own individual story that’s being lived out within the painting. It’s not of a moment but more of a scene. Is Bosch an influence?

Yeah, when you look at his pictures, everyone has their own little thing. I love his work. But for years, I was inspired by the regionalists: Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and Dale Nichols and those people. There are different surrealists I really enjoy — René Magritte.

You’ve also done a book of surreal houses, Houses on Parade. What’s behind that?

We had a house fire at our Merriam house — it wiped it out pretty bad. So we were staying in a little apartment house, and one day, I was going, “House fire, fire house, firehouse.” OK, we got firehouse. “Icehouse, row house” — look at how many. So that’s what started it — I came up with about 90 paintings. It’s a guessing book, so if you can’t guess the picture, you can go to the “house key” in the front, and it tells you the title.

You’ve explored a style you call “prismatism.” What is that, and are you still engaging with it?

I need to get back to that. It’s harder. It takes longer. It’s really very simple in a way, but when you look at it, it kind of messes with your mind. It’s basically two colors creating a third color. If you have an intersection, and one color’s yellow and one’s red, you’ll have orange in the middle. You’re painting what’s behind it. You have to know what’s on that other side and almost think 3-D in your head.

Way back, Charles Sheeler, one of the American regionalists, kind of experimented a little with it. I took off on that to make it go even further. Around 2000, I was just playing around with it — how far can I take this? I thought about it, and I just wanted to try to see if it worked for me. The challenging part is still making it look rendered — light change, shadow and backlighting, combining those with the overlapping technique.

Does prismatism sell?

I’ve sold a lot of them. The gentleman in Ecuador prefers these.