BY STACY PERALTA It was just after 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night in the winter of 2023 when the phone rang. It was my friend Mike Shine calling out of the blue and telling me he was holed up at a grungy beach motel about a mile away. He asked if I would stop at the nearest liquor store, grab a bottle of red wine and join him. When I arrived he had his easel set up in the narrow space between the double bed and the window. He was midway through a painting when he told me he was traveling from Bolinas to Santa Monica, stopping along the way at cheap motels, completing a new painting, and then moving on. I uncorked the wine bottle, ripped off the wrapping from two plastic motel cups and poured us each a glass. We toasted and began catching up. Mike and I met in 2004. He was one of the founders of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, then the country’s most successful mid-level advertising agency, made famous for their well-known MINI Cooper campaign. I had directed an ad campaign for Columbia Sportswear, a company his agency represented, and got to know him on the shoot. During that campaign he told me he was leaving his position to begin a new career as a painter. I thought he was nuts considering how successful his company was, but then again, I had just met him and didn’t know how creative and determined he was. Later that night as we depleted the wine we hit a lull in the conversation. As I looked around the space I noticed how void it was of anything interesting. It was just a plain, ugly motel room. I had an idea: “It would be really cool to do a painting for this room, something that might brighten it up and something the maids wouldn’t even notice.” I said it more as a joke, I wasn’t serious but Mike put his brush down and looked at me. I could see his wheels turning. He removed the canvas from the easel he’d been working on and replaced it with a fresh one. “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it!” I laughed aloud as he handed me a brush, “But I don’t know how to paint!” Mike smiled and casually replied, “You’re about to learn.” For the next two hours I carefully watched him paint and then, just as carefully, followed his instructions while he guided me on how to use the brush properly. We tag-teamed the canvas until somewhere around midnight we had a finished painting. The next morning I arrived with a few cups of coffee and a tack. I pressed the tack into one of the open walls and Mike hung the painting. It rested nicely as if it had always been there. He sipped his coffee and then turned to me and said, “That was so much fun that I want to do it again”. That evening Mike checked himself into anaother grungy beach motel a few blocks down the boulevard, this one just as void of beauty as the previous one. Except it had a Western theme which lent the idea to paint a black and white portrait of John Wayne. Mike sketched out Wayne’s face on the canvas and then under his guidance and enthusiasm we completed our second painting by midnight. We hung it the next morning right next to the faded picture of an old saloon. “It’s a perfect fit,” Mike said, “looks like it’s always been there.” We hit two more motels over the following two days. Each featured a new painting that reflected the aesthetic of that particular room. At our fourth motel we produced a painting of my dog, Toby, my friend’s dog, Finn, and the motel owner’s dog, Julius, all three pictured together at the check-in desk. We titled the painting Three Dog Night. It was such a sweet image that we decided against hanging it in Mike’s room and instead gave it to the motel owner. We presented it to her the next morning. She looked at it and started crying. — I’ve been drawing all of my life. I began as a kid copying the cartoon characters out of Mad Magazine and then moved forward a notch by copying the magnificent waves of artist Rick Griffin, the famous cartoonist in Surfer Magazine. But by high school my drawing style had flipped to the abstract. I doodled in every notebook and in every class if the teacher allowed. If I could doodle, I could hear and absorb what MIKE SHINE, STACY PERALTA, SAWYER SHINE
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