Gravity & Levity opens at Laura Rathe Fine Art on July 9th and presents a curated selection of paintings and sculptures that embody a new sense of depth through shapes and patterns oscillating over the borders of lightness and density. Moving freely across a variety of media, the artworks are unified in their exploration of suspended motion, through abstract forms appearing to be simultaneously pulled and released, transcending the laws of nature. Each of the four exhibiting artists engage in different subject matter through their uniquely developed techniques to collectively delve into the marriage of gravity and levity.
Among the four artists, Michael Schultheis has honed his practice into what he calls Analytical Expressionism. It is a practice wholly his own. As a mathematician, Schultheis uses the language embedded in math to express truths about the factual world, our mythologies, and his own personal life.
Patron caught up with Schultheis about the secrets in his work, the intersections of art & math, his journey in life, and his form of visual language:
PATRON (P): Will you describe the spaces in-between human and geometric relationships?
Michael Schultheis (MS): Overlapping two circular wedding rings creates a sudden feeling of love, fidelity, and the shared experience within the relationship of two partners and their many years of life together. The shared space in between these two circles–the lens –is the fascinating part in which we can imbue myriad narratives that represent such things as the hours the couple spends together or how many years they share their life.
When I write the equation for this geometry, a Venn Diagram appears in my mind. When I write it into my painting, you can see it on the internal chalkboard of all your mind, as well. Here, it is conceptual geometry in art, and percolating with whatever stories we want to tell about their relationship.
P: Are these relationships the basis to your theory of Analytical Expressionism?
MS: The poet Mary Oliver suggests we “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” This is what I try to do, using the remarkably visual language of mathematics. For 3000 years, artists have been putting geometry into art. I continue this by adding the equations so that if we know this language of math, then we can see the geometry in our own minds.
Andy Warhol created a portrait titled Beethoven, and I became curious with it because I play the cello and love Beethoven’s work. Warhol included some musical notes that look merely decorative to many viewers. However, if you know how to read sheet music, the notes come to life and you begin hearing the Ninth Symphony perform as the soundtrack to the artwork in your mind. By including the math, Analytical Expressionism allows for both the visual and conceptual geometry in art. Whether it is the language of music or mathematics or the painted words of Louise Bourgeois, art can tell us more about ourselves.
P: Describe your journey in art making and how you’ve arrived at the place you are now? What were your struggles—was there a time you wanted to give up, and how did you overcome those struggles?
MS: I grew up on a cattle ranch and wheat farm in Eastern Washington, where my high school math teacher encouraged me to focus on math and go to college. Although I have never had an art class, I spent many years in front of chalkboards while in graduate school at Cornell, where I fell in love with the ghost-like erasures. Then when I worked at Microsoft on Excel, I was enchanted with the equations on the whiteboards, and how people from all over the world could share visualizations with equations. The whiteboards were not landscapes, but mindscapes, and this is how I continue to see my paintings.
When I began painting, it was a struggle to teach myself art history, art theory, materials, and technique. But I embraced the beginner’s mind and continue to thrive on all the new ideas to be discovered.
I have been very fortunate to have exhibited at the National Academies, National Academy of Sciences, National Museum of Mathematics, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. My paintings, bronze sculpture, and digital NFT video are currently exhibiting at the United States Embassy to the European Union. But a wonderful challenge is when someone disregards art with mathematics in it, even though we can enjoy the equations in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Hilma af Klint, and Cy Twombly. Math is a language, like any other, but we can communicate remarkably beautiful things to see and share them with each other in perpetuity. Some people will say teasingly: “Get lost!” For me, I love getting lost while painting and sculpting. Then it brings me great joy when someone else gets lost in my work while experiencing it, and we find each other.
P: You work on canvas and create sculptures. Could some mathematical equations/language be better expressed two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally?
MS: Yes, but in addition to 2D or 3D, we can extend that to conceptual, 1D and 4D as well. In my work, I include the math equations for the true conceptualization of geometry; paint the geometry in 2-dimensional space; visually pull those geometries off the canvas, model them with my bonsai wires, and cast them in bronze in the 3-dimensional; and then add time variables and arrays of values in the painting for the 4-dimensional space of time. For example, we can write an equation for a circle, imbue the circle with a narrative about how our circle of friends is getting larger, paint a circle, sculpt a circle, and then increase the values of the circumference and diameter over time. This changes geometry in art from merely the static to dynamic.
P: Do you enjoy keeping secrets in plain sight?
MS: Yes, but don’t tell anyone. In the middle right side of the paintings, there is a twelve-sided polygon that simultaneously represents a clock, calendar, the polar coordinate system, and the Circle of Fifths. Onto this dodecagon I map the birthdays, anniversaries and significant dates of people who are important in my life. These significant dates are represented by overlapping rings, and when the orbits of the years together are stacked one on top of the other, year upon year, it resembles the luminary rings of a chandelier, with each orbit getting smaller as we get older in life. At the end of our lives, we can look back down through the years, and see the imperfect but beautiful concentric circles of Kandinsky.
P: You’ve included personal stories in your work, including your parents’ relationship with each other. How do you balance the emotional weight of the narratives you evoke with the coldness of mathematics? Though, as it is very clear in your work, math isn’t cold, it’s heavenly.
MS: Poetry calls things by their right name, and the interdisciplinary study of Analytical Expressionism provides a conceptual framework to name human experiences with both elegance and beauty. I use real mathematical equations in my paintings to allow viewers to see geometry conceptually, and also to imbue human relationships into the geometric relationships. Through this door we enter a universe of unfolding poetic human narratives.
Mathematics is the most eloquent and elegant language to describe geometry visually – on the internal chalkboards of our minds. There, in the conceptual realm, it is true geometry for the first time in art. And once you know this, you cannot unknow it: all geometry in the physical realm is merely approximation. Like someone who has perfect pitch and cringes at the symphony when every F-sharp is flat: when they can finally read the sheet music, they are in tonal heaven.
P: Math tends to build theories on top of each other, one theory proving another, opening a door to the next…etc.
Does your art-making process also build upon itself?
MS: The overlapping Venn Diagram of two lovers’ wedding rings is just the prelude for a wonderfully complex story of how they orbit together, year after year, sometimes a bit wobbly, but then grow old together.
We can build on this imagery and expand it to include my favorite geometric progeny of Pythagoras: the limaçon. This beautiful snail-like shape has an interior and exterior curvature. This form was studied by the German painter and mathematician Albrecht Dürer, and I find its polar equation and curvature fascinating as well as the perfect structure for modeling human relationships. For example, by varying two parameters in the limaçon equation, I create a visual representation of the continuum of consciousness inspired by the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung. I take a geometric form such as a limaçon and imbue it with symbolism, creating a geometric model.
P: The world is governed by forces that we can see through math, however, for most people complex mathematical equations look like ‘äe=urh*72/q+D=ebñ237afsdūoa.’ How important is it to you to give the beauty of math a face?
MS: One of my favorite paintings by the Belgian artist Rene Magritte is of a pipe. Beneath the pipe he wrote the phrase in French “this is not a pipe.” As one of the most important Surrealist painters, Magritte invites us to consider the nature of what we see. I meditate every morning, and Magritte’s work helps me reflect on new ways of seeing – even though I cannot read French. Although many viewers of my work may not know the language of mathematics, there are more people who can read Calculus than who can read French. In this way, Magritte’s painting reminds us that not everyone speaks the same language. There are as many different languages used in art (Sol Lewitt, Ed Ruscha, Alejandro Guijjara, Jenny Holzer), and as many different interpretations of an artwork as there are viewers. With art, every response is valid.
P: What are some of your most recent investigations?
MS: My mother is experiencing dementia. I have found a geometry that describes how dementia hollows out a loved one’s consciousness. Although it is devastating, my mother lives completely in the present and more in the moment than she has ever done before. This is a lesson she is teaching me, and the geometry allows me to see it.
I have a brand-new baby grandniece, and she is a bright light in my life. The geometry of the Renaissance mathematician Giovanni Ceva called the Cycloid of Ceva is the perfect way to see how the consciousness of my mother can pass through me and into this new addition to our family.
In the Cycloid of Ceva, there are small interior loops represent two people reaching for each other to experience the Venn overlap of their collective consciousness. The larger loops represent the reverberation before, and the resonation after we connect with someone, capturing all the precious moments of connection between us, when we become aware of all of our personal relationships, and how we can visualize them. The Dalai Lama encourages people to visualize their consciousness through their lives. My bronze sculpture of Cycloid of Ceva allows us to visualize our consciousness and think about how to increase our area of overlap with another person over time.
P: What advice would you give to aspiring artists, creatives, or mathematicians wanting to make a career out of their craft?
MS: Paint what you know. Create what electrifies your passion. Be good to yourself and kind to others.
If you have trouble deciding when a piece is finished, consider it as an experiment. Do your experiment and then move on to the next experiment. At the end of your life, your oeuvre is simply all series of your experiments.
The final suggestion comes from a quote by Rumi: “I want to sing like the bird sings, not worrying about who hears, or what they think.”
See Michael Schultheis along with Marina Savashynskaya Dunbar, Bronson Shonk, and Sydney Yeager on July 9th for the reception from 4-7 P.M. with an artist talk at 6 P.M. at Laura Rathe Fine Art.