Asking questions seeking answers: an interview with Michal Lile - Interview

Arts & Activities, Dec, 2001 by Harriet Gamble

Michal Lile is a high school art teacher and an emerging artist with a unique style of teaching, an insatiable drive to learn and grow, and a remarkable philosophy about life and art. Since he graduated from Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., 10 years ago, with his teaching contract in hand, he has pursued his two professional goals--to teach and make art--with determination and dedication.

In the following interview, Michal shares his experiences as a teacher, his growth and evolution as an artist, the challenges of trying to balance full-time teaching and making art, and his distinctive approach to reaching his goals.

H.G. How and why did you get started in art?

M.L. I grew up in a family in which object-making was the rule rather than the exception. My father was a welder and woodworker, and my mother was a seamstress who now quilts. My grandfather, a Romanian immigrant, could do amazing things with a clarinet, and my grandmother (also Romanian) crocheted. As soon as I was old enough to be trusted with working on a band saw, I spent endless hours in my father's woodshop making wooden boats to send down the creek behind our house.

H.G. Please describe how your work and your life as a teacher and artist have evolved.

M.L. When I graduated from Purdue in the fall of 1991, I immediately began pursuing my professional goals of teaching and making art with gusto. In the fall of 1994, the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art (Ind.) hosted an exhibit of artists who teach throughout 20 Midwestern states. This was the first juried exhibition I entered, and my entry, a sculptural painting, was awarded "Best of Show."

Then came spring, the birth of the first of my two daughters, a change in schools, and a new house. Despite the fact that the new house included a studio, I found very little time to make art between the demands of family and teaching photography and visual communications at Ben Davis High School. I continued to create sketches until the fall of 1998, when I finally found the time again to create finished work. Since then, I've been dedicating more time to my art and have completed a sizable series of work using heat-set oils.

H.G. Let's first focus on your career as an artist. Have you always been a painter?

M.L. I prefer visual artist. I describe most of my recent productive activity as making sculptural or object paintings. As a student at Purdue, I spent most of my energy making ceramic sculpture and woodcut prints. However, even then, I never wanted to feel limited by media or technique. For some time in the early 1990s, most of my productive work was written.

H.G. Why did you start creating the sculptural paintings on wood?

M.L. I took a one-week painting workshop at the University of Indianapolis in the summer of 2000 at which I was introduced to these new heat-set oils. I have always preferred the stiff surface of wood as opposed to canvas for painting. Therefore, I arrived at class on the first day with a bag full of plywood, cut and ready for paint.

I spent the first half of the workshop washing acrylic and gouache on wooden cubes I had made, avoiding the issue of the paint. Finally, brush in hand, I tried it. The brush didn't work for me, but I found that I loved applying it to wood with a palette knife and "writing" into the surface with a pencil. In the next few days, I quickly made the first works of my current series, which I call "letters, notes, etc."

H.G. With the demands of teaching and family, how do you manage to find time for your art?

M.L. My studio is at the top of the stairs and must be passed to go to or from my bedroom. I try to stop in the studio and look at my works in progress in the morning and before bed every day. This practice helps me to keep ideas flesh in my mind. During the summer months and on weekends, I paint in a couple-hour increments each day as time permits--which is usually nap time for the 22-month-old. I also paint after my daughters are in bed, usually for about an hour.

During the school year, I typically set aside one night a week to paint and still try to devote an hour on the other nights after the girls are asleep. I keep paper and pen in both vehicles at all times as my ideas come from everyday life. The painting media I use, Genesis[TM] Heat-Set Artist Oils, gives me the freedom to work on such a schedule because they remain wet from one day to the next--until they are set by heat. If I want to dry a painting, it takes about 20 minutes in the oven. Traditional oil colors could not give me that freedom. Additionally, with two small children in the house, this media is odorless and nontoxic. So, I can have my studio in my house and not worry about safety.

H.G. What message are you conveying through your art and how are you doing this?

M.L. I make art for one purpose--to converse about important ideas with people who care to look, think and grow. I want to enter the larger conversation about life by communicating to a larger audience. I know there exists an audience who wants to participate in this conversation. My intention is to find them--all of them.