Mike Shogren
by Audrée Peters

Mike Shogren’s mother was an artist, but he wasn’t interested. He had better things to do while growing up.

“I was interested in girls, cars, and so forth,” he says with an ironic grin. “I would come home and Mom would be up there in her studio painting away all the time. I’d go to sleep.

“But it must have kind of rubbed off on me, because later on I really became interested in it,” he says.

One day when Shogren was in his 20s, he went to an art museum.

“I came around a corner, and there was a Michelangelo Caravaggio painting there, the most beautiful painting I ever saw. It just knocked me over. I was just emotionally moved.

“Michelangelo Caravaggio” – not to be confused with the Michelangelo who painted the Sistine Chapel – “was an Italian painter in the 15th century,” he says. “I started reading up on him after that. He used subtle lights and darks. He was just fabulous.

“And I thought, ‘Boy, I’m going to do this.’ So I went and got a book on drawing and everything, and from that point on I was drawing.”

Shogren shares his secret: “Drawing is the essence of painting. With a paint brush, you’re just drawing with a brush.”

And he says he couldn’t get enough of drawing.

“I started drawing at business meetings and everywhere. I did it for years and years,” he says with a laugh.

 “I used to draw them in ink, and I would roll up my drawings and toss them in the basket. But I knew I was getting better at it when my co-workers started pulling them out of the basket, pressing them out and taking them home and framing them.”

Shogren moved to Scottsdale from North Dakota in 1964.

“I got into the painting very gradually, until I retired and could paint full time,” he recalls.

And he was ready to make up for lost time at the canvas.

Since he moved to Fountain Hills in 1998, “I’ve been painting away,” he says with obvious pleasure.

He has done over 400 paintings since he set himself free to paint.

He laughs as he remembers, “I didn’t even know how to handle a tube of paint when I started painting. The first time I opened a tube, it squirted all over.

“I have probably read a thousand books on art,” he says, and he has a bookcase crammed full of his favorites.

He also attended some classes at Scottsdale Art School, and visited many art galleries, studying the masters.

But the natural talent kept taking over, and he found it more enjoyable to just let things flow.

“It’s just a real passion,” he says.

“I put a lot of color in them,” he says, pleased. “I learned color by myself. A lot of artists go to art school for years and take classes on color and do charts and study colors, but I just fly by the seat of my pants.”

His impressionist paintings of nudes, Paris in the rain, bar scenes and portraits of French ladies in bonnets are reminiscent of Manet paintings.

“I was looking at art all these years and fell in love with Manet as an artist and an impressionist,” he confides.

A romantic in his work, Shogren recalls a line from Ernest Hemingway’s last novel when he said that Paris is “a moveable feast.”

He explains that Hemingway meant, “once you go to Paris, wherever you go from then on, you enjoy life more.”

Shogren paints whatever excites him. He does not limit himself to a topic or era. He enjoys the feeling of discovery more than anything.

“I hunt and peck with the paint brush, and learn as I go. There’s a lot about painting to learn,” he says.

His paintings are charged with character, excitement and emotion.

Sometimes he paints to capture the spirit of wild mustangs, with flaring nostrils and wind-blown manes.

His southwestern paintings of Native Americans of many different tribes show strength and pride, or deep concentration.

And his seasoned, rustic westerners look out hauntingly from under hats covered with the dust of the desert, or the snow of the high country.

Sometimes he uses live models, and sometimes his own romantic imagination.

Sometimes, as in the case of his authentically detailed paintings of Native Americans, he works from several photographs that he can study from different angles to get the feel of the subject.

For many of these paintings, he explains, “I’ve got a photographer up in Utah who gets around and takes a lot of pictures at the Pow-Wows and so forth, then I buy the exclusive rights to these photographs.”

He then studies all the photos to come up with his own vision and pose of the subject, giving it life and expression.

Many of his paintings of the Native Americans tend to be quiet and reflective.

“That’s my signature. You know, everybody’s is different, and this is mine.”

Shogren’s studio is unexpected. It is more like a burrow in the mayhem of his garage. But for him it is as comfortable as a favorite old chair molded to his body.

“I didn’t plan it this way, I just got flat lucky,” he says.

He discovered by accident that the light in the garage gave him a perfect northern exposure when the door is open. He also enjoys it when people driving by stop to visit and see what he’s working on.

He says that he works for about an hour at a time on a painting, then often switches to another that he is working on, to stay fresh as he works.

“You can only do about an hour or two on one painting. It’s the strangest thing,” he says. “But if you put that away and go to another one, you have a whole new refreshing outlook and you can paint for another hour or two.”

Currently, in Fountain Hills, some of Shogren’s nudes are on display at Caroline’s Restaurant on Saguaro Blvd., and he also has a selection of paintings at Yates Gallery on Avenue of the Fountains.

He has previously displayed at Pointe of View at the Pointe Hilton, and has done several art shows. He belongs to the Sonoran Art League and the Scottsdale Art League and has won many ribbons in the juried art shows.

Shogren can be reached at (480) 816-5669. More of his paintings can be viewed at www.shogrengallery.com.
          

This artist was featured June 2006.