C. Michael Dudash: Finding His Way
After a successful career in illustration, C. Michael Dudash is taking the West by storm.
In the throes of deadline, with several final works still on the easel or in planning stages, C. Michael Dudash is doing what many artists do at this point before a solo show: He’s taking his time, as fast as he can.
“Oh, I’m swamped here,” he says from his Idaho studio. “I’m finishing up some work now, but at this point I have to let the chips fall where they may.”
The chips will fall favorably for Dudash, who is no stranger to deadlines. He’s been a fine artist since 2000, and before that was an illustrator for 25 years. Like brushes, paints and canvases, deadlines come with the territory. His new show—tales of the Painted West opening March 5 at Legacy Galley in Scottsdale, Arizona—will feature 20 works, the largest show of his career by nearly a dozen paintings.
“I’ve done mostly group shows up to this point. Just shows with four to six paintings and that was it. So 20 is an absolutely watershed moment for me and my career. I’ve been with Legacy for 17 years and we’ve talked about doing this for a long time,” Dudash says, adding that Legacy’s recent roster of blockbuster solo shows has inspired him to bring his best work. “The fact that Legacy would put me in the same group of artists as John Coleman, Martin Grelle, Kyle Polzin and Bill Anton is very humbling to me. To be mentioned in the same breath with artists of this caliber is flattering.”
To anyone following Dudash’s recent career, though, this big Legacy show will not come as a surprise. The artist has been quietly
rising through the ranks of Western art for some time, with a noticeable spike in the last five or six years as he has frequently sold out at major museum shows. He’s also won top awards, his paintings are larger and compositions more complex, and in 2016 he was invited to join the Cowboy Artists of America, which raised his profile even further. Tales of the Painted West is the natural culmination of a fascinating career that begins far outside the West.
Born and raised in Minnesota, the artist was given the name Charles Michael Dudash—“my dad wanted Charles, my mom wanted Michael,” the artist says, “but now I can be C.M. Dudash, which is not far off from C.M. Russell.” While growing up, arts and music were strongly encouraged at home. “I get the free expression part from my mom and the other side of the brain from my dad, who was very analytical. Both loved music and I almost became a musician,” the artist says. “But I also did art, which I was involved with as much as I could. I just loved
to draw and I took every art class I could. By the time I got to high school my drafting ability was pretty darn established.”
After high school, and a six-year detour as a musician, Dudash returned to art, starting with a brief stint at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It was here that he submitted a still life work into a group show—“it was almost my very first oil painting,” the artist adds—and an art director saw it and promptly offered him a job, which he took.
Then in his mid-20s, Dudash was exposed to all kinds of new subjects and design opportunities in Minneapolis as an illustrator. He recalls doing drawings for a medical magazine. “On the weekends I would do everything I could to keep working and to keep learning, so I went to a medical school and they would let me in to draw the cadavers. The janitor would come and lock me in this room with 30 cadavers for the night. I would have to ring this bell for him so he could come let me out when I was done,” Dudash says. “I never had planned to become an illustrator. It just sort of happened. After I married Valerie I found an agent in New York and two weeks later I had a job for Reader’s Digest. It happened really quickly.”
From 1978 to 2000, Dudash’s works were seen all over the world: 150 book covers, stamps for the United States Postal Service, works for more than 100 Fortune 500 companies and artwork for publications such as TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream, Mccall’s and Good Housekeeping. By his guess, more than 1,500 of his illustrations were published.
Some of his more prominent works were related to movies, including films such as Waterworld, Silverado, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, The Two Jakes and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. The work that tends to fascinate Western fans, though, is his poster piece for Pale Rider, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Western about a gun-slinging preacher who shows up to save a town from a villainous mine owner and his henchmen.
“I had been freelancing for five years in New York and I hadn’t done any Western stuff at the time. I had a very particular style of painting then, with sort of a loose drawing and then an oil wash on top of it—i had a distinct look to my work. My agent had done some work with Bill Gold Advertising in New York, and they had a second branch in Los Angeles that had done all of Eastwood’s posters. They had seen some of work in my portfolio so they asked me to work up a poster based on an idea they had,” Dudash says. “They sent me a package with some 8-by10 stills of the bad guys, the Western town and Clint. I had about two days to get something done and send it out to Los Angeles.”
He continues: “About a week went by and I got a call—‘you got the poster.’ Apparently Clint Eastwood came into the room where all the posters were lined up and he walked in front of them and then walked back to mine and chose it. But then, and I heard this from people who were there, he pointed at my signature on the painting. Back then you weren’t really supposed to sign your work, but he saw my name and thought it sounded interesting. He did a little dance and sang, ‘Camptown ladies sing this song, Dudash, Dudash.’ They did have me do some tweaks, including moving the town from the top of the hat to the side, and some other small things. But a month later and it was all over the place. I happened to be in Manhattan and it was on subways and billboards everywhere. Later I was in Los Angeles and walking down Sunset Boulevard and there my image was on a huge billboard. It was a lot of fun.”
Fifteen years later, with the quiet implosion of traditional illustration—largely defeated by photography and digital design—it came time to explore new avenues, so Dudash turned to his art friends, including painters such as Dan Gerhartz, C.W. Mundy, Nancy Guzik and Richard Schmid, who he had met in New York and painted with on several occasions.
“Richard was painting from life with landscapes and still lifes with flowers. I thought that was what I was going to do. I was living out east at the time. We had 17 acres near the Amish—robert Griffing and John Buxton were also nearby. I knew I could take the Dan Gerhartz, Richard Schmid, Quang Ho path, or I could do something else entirely. I had to narrow down what I was going to do, and not be all over the place,” he recalls. “At the time, Legacy was trying to get me to do some Western work. I had resisted for a long time, but then I had a friend whose dad looked like actor Sam Elliott. The painting had a Western look and it was called Friend or Foe. I painted my body, but with his face. Legacy was doing backflips for it. They could have sold it five times over. I had been praying for years for some kind of direction and then the doorbell went off. And it was everything I’ve been working on since:
contemporary cowboy scenes, pioneer paintings, Native American material. It was all right there.”
For Tales of the Painted West, Dudash will be bringing those aspects of the West into his new work. He has painted outlaws and adventurers, gold panners and Jesuit missionaries, and numerous pieces that show Native Americans living within nature and defending it from outside forces. Each one shares a common element: storytelling.
In Black Robe – Fr. John Pierre Desmet, for instance, the artist paints a rocky ridgeline occupied by a fascinating cast of figures that include Native Americans, soldiers and a Belgian missionary near the painting’s center. The figures are clearly gazing off at something in the distance, but Dudash knows the power of the scene is not in what they are looking at, but the reaction of those who are looking. The story is in the posture of the figures, their position on the ridge, and the drama in their faces as they stand and comprehend whatever is before them.
“In all of my reading and research on the settlement of the West, I rarely have found a biography as compelling as the life of the missionary Fr. Pierre John Desmet. This is the second painting that I have done of him, and the time frame could be from the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s,” he says of the work. “Known and revered by all of the Northern Plains Indians, his love and advocacy for the Salish/flatheads and many other Native American tribes earned for him their trust and the title of Black Robe. I urge anyone who has an interest in the subject of the settlement of the American frontier to read about the remarkable journeys of Fr. Desmet.”
In Ridge Runners, which shows three Native American figures on a cliff above a canyon, the figures’ faces are mostly obscured, but we can see the landscape and can sense the danger that comes with defending it. “The unusual perspective of this painting was a lot of fun to create and paint,” he says. “The sense of distance and drama we feel as we look down upon these three Apaches trailing along a high ridge, illustrates how they felt at home in the rugged and beautiful terrain of the Southwest. From their lofty perch, they are keeping a close eye on some approaching intruders moving closer by way of the distant canyon’s dry river bed.”
Other works show the majesty and beauty of life in the Old West, whether it’s riding with a herd of horses under gathering clouds in Ahead of the Storm, or in the simple act of fishing in a quiet stream in Patience, which features three Native American women.
Tales of the Painted West opens March 5 with an artist reception planned for March 7 that will include a fixed-price, by-draw sale. For Dudash, who’s worked tirelessly for the past year on this show, he’s excited to see the works go to new homes after leaving his studio.
“Art is a complicated industry, with so many moving parts. No one has it figured out. Year after year, month after month, everything changes,” he says. “The only thing you control is what you send out the door of your studio. You have to put your heart into each and every one of them.”
C. MICHAEL DUDASH: TALES OF THE PAINTED WEST March 5-15, 2020; artist reception, March 7 Legacy Gallery, 7178 Main Street, Scottsdale, AZ 85251 (480) 945-1113, www.legacygallery.com