Double trouble
Two artists find new inspiration in collaboration
Artists Michi and John Tindel have a lot in common. They both went to college in Alabama; Michi at the University of North Alabama and Tindel at the University of South Alabama. Each chafed under the whip crack of instructors enforcing their own painting styles. Rejecting traditional painting, both instead favor an expressionist swirl of pop culture influences melding folk art, animation, graffiti, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Max Beckmann, if Beckmann moonlighted as a graphic novelist.
But there are some differences, too, most noticeably of the ebony and ivory variety. Michi, 30, wears his head in a wild mass of tiny dreads. Tindel, 28, works a slightly hip-hop version of preppy, with an oversized blue oxford shirt and khakis.
Tindel is also a morning guy, which explains his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed demeanor at 10 a.m., even while operating on just a few hours of sleep.
Michi, however, is on vampire time. He’s the party animal and “socialite” of the two, he says. He clutches a pack of cigarettes like an 80-year-old fondles his heart medicine. The act of moving from the interior of his car to the exterior world of sunshine appears onerous and painful.
The artists are up early on a Saturday morning to offer a preview of their collaborative art show at the Defoor Centre called The Dual, in which the artists (exhibiting along with Brooklyn artist Rich Jacobs) have found a way to make some superficial differences and some deeper-seated similarities work for them.
At a rainy Dogwood Festival a few years ago, Michi and Tindel began to pass a painting back and forth, adding their own little flourishes, responding to the other’s work.
What started out as an unconscious tag-team doodle gave rise to an idea — a way to create a new art-making process in which accident and experiment could thrive.
“Like a chess match back and forth,” is how Tindel describes the process.
But unlike in chess, there are no real rules. Each artist can choose to erase the other one’s work if they don’t like it, as Tindel did when he took issue with Michi’s rendition of a chicken in their painting “Oak Turner.”
Tindel did some painterly surgery on the fowl, which stands on the words “Oak Turner” on a canvas where a wallpaper-style flower pattern, stars and Rubenesque clouds all harmonize. The work is animated and lively, with a sense of nostalgia betrayed in the retro typefaces. Even the recurring sherbety color schemes in their Dual paintings suggest the pair are working with a fresh, manic, child’s-eye view of the world.
Each artist has his shtick. Michi’s canvases are filled with his signature Radio Flyer red wagons, rag doll figures and social commentary on war and violence. Tindel, a former graphic artist, has a love of typefaces, decorative elements like vortexes and a recurring dashed line, which weaves through his canvases like his own Greek key design.
When the artists work in tandem, some of those visual habits recede into the background. A punchier, more kinetic force surfaces in works that look like movie posters for some unspecified mental state. A free-range, abstract moodiness takes the place of comfortable routine. In “Oasis,” the notion of a respite from the heat takes on popish South Florida tones, where little cigarette pack Camel silhouettes walk beneath cotton candy clouds, and pink flamingos — more Miami Beach yard art than real — emerge from the haze.
Though the seeds for Tindel and Michi’s collaborative experiment can be found in the Surrealist exquisite corpse game or the traditions of graffiti, their real source of inspiration is much more basic. The spontaneous process of sharing in creation allows Tindel and Michi to tap into the anarchical, wild style imagination most adults have lost touch with, something Michi sees every day working with young students in the after school art program at the South Fulton Art Center.
“I steal a lot of ideas from those kids,” he quips, laughing. “Adults try to put too much into it.”
Michi and Tindel hope collaboration will help each other remember what it felt like to just create without asking questions or second guessing oneself.
Staying fresh and open and keeping adult intellect at bay is a constant struggle, says Michi. Before you know it, he says, “your brain’s already telling you what to do.”