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 they were saying. If I couldn’t, my mind wandered out the door.
Although I drew for years, what I really wanted to do was paint. Miró and Kandinsky are two of my favorite painters, so I assumed that since I already drew in the abstract, I would paint in the abstract. But no matter how many times I tried, I could never connect with it, I just didn’t find it as satisfying as drawing. Yet I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint so badly that for two years I used paint-by-numbers. I loved the process of brushing paint on canvas and completed almost twenty of them: flowers in vases, flowers in fields, ballet dancers, pianists, you name it. It never occurred to me that I might like painting real-life objects as opposed to abstract pieces.
When Mike Shine arrived that night in that dingy beach motel and coerced me into taking on the brush in this new way, it opened a chapter in my life that I didn’t know was there to open. He not only encouraged me to paint alongside him during our four motel visits, he encouraged others. During that same week we threw a few small impromptu dinner parties inside the various rooms he was staying in. Mike encouraged all of us to participate in group paintings which let us play like children. On one occasion we produced a painting of Captain Crunch and on another the Nestlé Drumstick ice cream cone. It was pure, stupid fun. Mike presented painting as something that can be done loosely and playfully and without a lot of heady thinking. He made it accessible and attainable. I mean, painting Captain Crunch and an ice cream cone? Can it get any less serious?
Yet, serious it became. Because had someone like a tarot card reader or a clairvoyant told me during that crazy week of guerrilla painting that in a year and a half I’d be showing my own paintings of real-life objects, I would have told them they were nuts. It would have made no sense to me on any level. I had no idea that Mike’s actions had lit a fuse inside of me.
The day he left town I began painting and I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I painted on any materials I could find: chunks of cement, large flat rocks, driftwood I found lying on the beach, old plywood and finally thick fibrous paper, which is where I eventually landed. I painted every day, some times eight hours a day. I got so much joy out of it that I lost myself in it. In one seven-month period I completed over ninety paintings. I wasn’t doing this to set a land-speed record, I was doing it because it made me feel good and it made me feel connected.
And then one day Gina, the woman I’m lucky enough to spend my life with, suggested I start painting images of my skateboard collection. I have an extremely rare collection, one of the most rare collections in the world dating back to the beginning of the sport, with homemade boards and repurposed roller skate trucks and wheels. But my collection had been sitting in darkness and unseen for decades. Even though it was something I had wanted to share with the world, I couldn’t find the venue to do so. She suggested painting individual pieces of it might be a way to share it. At first I thought it was a bad idea but then it began to grow in me and I decided to give it a shot. This was mid-September 2023. By February of the following year, a gallery owner named Charles Smith asked to show those very same paintings in his gallery not far from my home. And then a year later another show with gallerist Charles Adler in Santa Monica, and then group shows in Venice Beach, Hermosa Beach, Japan and then in Orange County at the Ohana Festival.
This crazy journey that suddenly sprung up in my life unexpectedly and without any advance warning at all began as the result of my allergic reaction to an ugly little motel room in a tiny town on the coast of California.
Stacy Peralta is a film director, artist and legendary skateboarder and surfer with the Zephyr Competition Team, also known as the Z-Boys, from Venice, California. Follow him on Instagram for more work.
Mike Shine is a Bolinas-based artist whose immersive work blends folklore, found materials, and West Coast mythology into raw, cinematic worlds. See more of his work on Instagram and his Website.
Check out Stacy’s last Birdy install A Strange Writing Practice with Neil Blender, and May Back Cover, Jay Smith Britelite Board from Mark Weatherstone’s Skatedeck Collection, in case you missed it, and keep your eyes peeled for more work by both of these talented creatives.