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Micahel Charles Spafford (born 6 November 1935) is an American artist known for his archetypal, figurative oil paintings drawn from Classical mythology featuring strikingly graphic, visceral painting with both subtractive as well as additive techniques to produce a sense of texture and strong spatial contrasts. After short sojourns in Rome and Mexico City, Spafford and his wife, the artist Elizabeth Sandvig, settled in Seattle where Spafford taught painting at the University of Washington, Seattle until his retirement in 1994.  Spafford continued to paint major works after leaving the University faculty.

Education and Early Years

Michael Spafford was the middle of three sons of Sarah Alice Maloney and Lynn Spafford, a businessman, and grew up in Greater Los Angeles. He became interested in the Classical myths in his Latin class at Riverside High School, one of his first artworks being a drawing of the Roman underworld based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Spafford was also interested in cartooning and was able to obtain a part-time job with an advertising agency in Riverside, California while still in high school, which he kept after graduating in 1953 and attending Riverside Junior College, and then transferring to Pomona College.

While at Pomona in 1956 Spafford suffered a serious car accident. When he returned someone else was using his studio space: a fellow art student, Elizabeth Sandvig, who eventually became his wife.   Spafford graduated from Pomona magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Spafford and Sandvig moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where Spafford had a full scholarship in art history at Harvard University and Sandvig pursued a teaching certificate in art at Radcliffe College.

After a year at Harvard, Spafford decided to pursue his interests in making art rather than studying art history and the couple moved to Mexico City to join Sandvig’s mother, where they could live inexpensively and concentrate on their art full time.

Career

Mexico City

After graduating from Pomona University and studying art history for a year at Harvard, Spafford moved to Mexico City where his mother-in-law lived so that he and his new wife, the artist Elizabeth Sandvig, could live and focus on their art.  Here Spafford was able to study the Miexican mural painters first-hand, and was influenced by their graphic portrayals of mythic subjects depicting powerful, often brutal imagery, their graphic, simplified forms and solid colors. It is in Mexico City that Spafford adopted his approach of taking a mythic subject, usually of Graeco-Roman origin, and working out multiple versions with strikingly graphic contrasts over a period of years.

In 1962 both Spafford and Sandvig had solo exhibitions in Mexico City at the Mexican-North American Cultural Institute.  Spafford’s  portrayal of death was noted as well as his “ruthless, hopeless, seared constructions of our time.”

After the birth of their son, Michael Andrew Spafford, (who is also an artist, a photographer who later changed his name to Spike Mafford) in 1963, Spafford accepted a teaching position with the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington. Two years later, Sandvig’s mother joined them in 1965.

Seattle

In Seattle, Spafford quickly earned prizes in both painting and drawing at the 1964 annual Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Fair, where the judge was George B. Culler, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art. The novelist, Tom Robbins, then writing for the Seattle Times newspaper, noted that Culler had no trouble awarding first prize to Spafford and that Spafford was “one of the few University of Washington professors to display any originality in the annual faculty show” the previous winter.

Spafford followed this with a solo show at the Otto Seligman Gallery, one of the most influential galleries in the Pacific Northwest in 1965, which became the Francine Seders gallery in May 1966 when Francine Seders took it over. Seders became Spafford’s main gallery representative for the next 50 years.   Spafford was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant the same year (1966).

In 1967, at the same annual fair, Spafford’s “Rape of Europa” was ordered to be taken down by the developer who managed the fair’s venue to great local controversy.  The developer was on the fair’s board, but so was Spafford and Spafford was a past winner of the show’s top awards.

The Prix de Rome and Italy

In 1967 Spafford had also just won the internationally prestigious Prix de Rome fellowship, being only the second American citizen at that point to do so. Spafford, along with Sandvig and their son, went to Rome, Italy, where he was given a spacious studio with 40 foot ceilings at the American Academy in Rome. In Italy, Spafford began to work larger and adopted key themes from the Roman myths that would inform his work for most of his career, including the myths of Leda and the swan, the twelve labors of Hercules, the fall of Icarus, and the myths around the fall of the Titans and Saturn. Spafford would later point out that living in a foreign culture helps an artist learn how to see.   He also began using diptych and triptych configurations while in Rome.

Public Art

Spafford and his wife, the artist Elizabeth Sandvig, became active in efforts to increase public funding of the arts upon their return to Seattle in 1969.  A member of The Artist’s Group (TAG), and its president in 1974, Spafford and the group and its allies successfully lobbied for one-percent-for-art legislation that would require one percent of the construction budget of public buildings to be spent on the acquisition and maintenance of art for those buildings. Spafford argued that art is not a decorative frill, but should be considered an essential part of a public building and its design. To do otherwise “is a crime against the people.”  In 1973 both Seattle and its surrounding county, King County, adopted one-percent ordinances. Washington state followed in 1974. By 1975 the Seattle Arts Commission had purchased art from 31 Northwest artists under the one-percent ordinance.

Ironically, in spite of Spafford’s support for public art, his own ventures into public commissions met with rather troubled fates. His 1980 commission for murals based on the twelve labors of Hercules for the Washington State legislature chambers led to his murals first being covered, then uncovered in 1989 before being removed entirely in 1993 and stored. See The Twelve Labors of Hercules (Spafford) for details. The murals were eventually installed at the Centralia College Corbet Theatre in 2002 after a decade of negotiations with the artist.

Spafford’s first public art commission was the 1978 King County Arts Commission installation of five images based on the Fall of Icarus (Tumbling Figure -- Five Stages) on the external wall of an elevator shaft of Seattle’s then NFL football stadium, the Kingdom. The design was executed in 1978, then Spafford took a one-year sabbatical to Mexico. Fabrication and installation were completed after Spafford returned from Mexico in 1979. The Kingdom was demolished in 2000 and Spafford’s work was put into storage.  In 1984 Tumbling Figure--Five Stages was installed on a parking garage at 6th avenue and Jefferson Street in Seattle.

In 1985 Spafford accepted a commission for the Seattle Opera House, producing a thirteen panel Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, after Wallace Stevens' poem. This time, the work was positively received.

Later Career

Returning from Mexico City in 1969, Spafford resumed his faculty position in the University of Washington, Seattle School of Art, teaching drawing and painting until his retirement in 1993.

A large diptych of the Labors of Hercules (1977) was purchased by the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) which led to a retrospective of Spafford’s paintings at the Seattle Art Museum in March and April 1982. The labors of Hercules would be a theme Spafford worked on for much of his career, creating over 60 works on the theme, including a 1987 set of woodblock prints which was the first art acquired by the Microsoft Art Collection.

In 1983, The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters gave Spafford a $5,000 award in the visual arts and included his paintings and graphic work in an academy exhibit in New York city the same year.

Spafford had a large solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1986 and another retrospective was held at the Bellevue Art Museum in 1991. A certain atonement was achieved in this show as the museum exhibited the Rape of Europa piece that had been taken down from the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair show 24 years earlier. In 2018, Spafford’s larger epic works, many of which had not been previously exhibited, and series of woodcut prints were exhibited in a three part exhibition involving three Seattle galleries, the Greg Kucera Gallery, Woodside/Braseth Gallery, and Davidson Galleries.

Style and Meaning

Spafford used the iconic images and universal themes found in classical myths to address the human condition. Returning again and again to the myths of Europa, Leda and the swan, the labors of Hercules, the fall of Icarus, Spafford sought to distill the primal power of these myths through highly re-worked painting, using both subtractive and additive methods to portray the struggle, both in his paint and in his themes, of human life.

As Seattle-based art critic, Regina Hackett puts it:

Michael Spafford abbreviates and freely alters the stories that interest him, ignoring the convoluted and decorative. What’s left are the primary passions, the excavated pressure points of human consciousness. … Myth is Spafford’s catalyst. He doesn’t want to shake the history of rape, romance, murder, phallus-worship, the pathological underpinnings of the heroic. In myth, he finds access to the extreme situations that cannot be dismissed as contemporary aberration.  He is after the pause before slaughter, the moment of cataclysmic fusion …

Private life

Spafford and his wife, Elizabeth Sandvig, upon receiving his position at the University of Washington in Seattle, purchased a modest house in Mountlake in which they have lived ever since. They were joined by Sandvig’s mother who moved up from Mexico City when she retired. Their son, the artist Spike Mafford, joined them with his wife Lisa Dutton Spafford, filling a house full of art that Ms Dutton Spafford lovingly portrays in her preface to Michael Spafford: Epic Works.

Awards

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2017 Lifetime Contribution to the Northwest Art Award(with Elizabeth Sandvig), Museum of Northwest Art (NONA), La Conner, Washington

2006 Mayor's Art Award, Family of Norhwest Artists: Spike Mafford, Elizabeth Sandvig, Michael Spafford, Seattle, Washington

2005/2006 Award for Visual Artists, Flintridge Foundation, Pasadena, California

2005 Artist-in-Residence, Dartmouth College, Hannover, Hew Hampshire

1999 Lifetme Achievement in the Arts Award, Corporate Council for the Arts, Seattle, Washington

1996 Neddy Artist Award, The Behnke Foundation, Seattle, Washington

1987 Centrum Print Commission, Fort Worden, Washington

1983 Art Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, New York

1979 King County Arts Commission's Honors Award, Seattle, Washington

1967-1969 Prix de Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy, Rome, Italy

1965-66 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, New York, New York

References

1. ^ Tate, Cassandra (14 December 2013). "Michael Spafford | MONA". Monamuseum.org. Retrieved 9 June 2020 – via Museum of Northwest Art (MONA) artist biographies.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
2. ^ Karlstrom, Paul (4 September 1992). "Oral History Interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig". aaa.si.edu. Retrieved 13 November 2013 – via Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
3. ^ Reno, Joe (Winter 1985). "Vision Interviews Michael Spafford". Vision: A Review of Northwest Visual Art.
4. ^ Guenther, Bruce (2018). Michael Spafford: Epic Works. Seattle: Lucia | Marquand Publishing. pp. 11–15. ISBN 978-0-9986817-9-5.
5. Joysmith, Toby (24 May 1962). "Ideas Exchanged, New Values Born in Mexico Art". Mexico City Collegian.
6. Robbins, Tom (26 July 1964). "Panaca Fair Is One of the Biggest Best". Seattle Times: 41.
7. Faber, Ann (13 January 1965). "Young Painter Offers Astounding Experiment". Seattle Post-Intelligencer: 16.
8. Spafford, Michael (October 1972). "TAG". Puget Soundings: 20, 34–36.
9. Hauser, Susan G. (31 July 1987). "Pols vs Hercules in Olympia". The Wall Street Journal: 1.
10. Kammen, Michael (2009). Visual Shock: A History of Controversies in American Art. Knopf Doubleday. p. 146. ISBN 0307548775.
11. Kangas, Matthew (6 January 1987). "The Opera House as Art Museum". The Weekly: 32.
12. Kangas, Matthew (November 1982). "Michael Spafford at the Seattle Art Museum". Art in America.
13. Guenther, Bruce (9 February 1986). "Michael Spafford". Seattle Art Museum exhibition catalog.
14. Hackett, Regina (2018). Michael Spafford: Epic Work. Seattle: Lucia | Marquand Publishing. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-9986817-9-5.
15. Dutton Spafford, Lisa (2018). Michael Spafford: Epic Work. Lucia | Marquand Publishing. pp. 9, preface. ISBN 978-0-9986817-9-5.

Bibliography

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (June 2020)

"Academic libraries (Centralia College special collections)", 2009 Directory of Washington Libraries (PDF), Washington State Library, 2009, p. 4

Cassandra Tate (December 14, 2013), Museum of  Northwest Art (MONA) biography https://www.monamuseum.org/artist/michael-spafford.

Faber, Ann (13 January 1965) "Young Painter Offers Astounding Experiment," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. 16

Guenther, Bruce (9 January 1986) exhibit essay, "Michael Spafford," Seattle Art Museum

Guenther, Bruce (2018) Michael Spafford: Epic Works. preface by Lisa Dutton Spafford, afterword by Michael Spafford, Seattle: Lucia | Marquand publishing, ISBN 978-0-9986817-9-5

Hackett, Regina (17 April 1991) "Tacoma Art Museum Scores with Exhibit of Teamwork," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. C-12

Hauser, Susan G. (31 July 1987) "Pols vs. Hercules in Olympia," Wall Street Journal, p. 1

Joysmith, Toby (24 May 1962 ) "Ideas Exchanged, New Values Born in Mexican Art," Mexico City Collegian

Kammen, Michael (2009). Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture. Knopf Doubleday

Kangas, Matthew (November 1982) "Michael Spafford at the Seattle Art Museum," Art in America

Kangas, Matthew (6 January 1987) "The Opera House as Art Museum," The Weekly, pp. 32-32

Kangas, Matthew (10 March 1987) "The Thinking Person's Northwest Artist," The Weekly, pp. 29-30

Karlstrom, Paul (4 September 1992) oral history interview with Michael Spafford and Elizabeth Sandvig, Archives of American Art website https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-michael-spafford-and-elizabeth-sandvig-12402

Robbins,Tom (26 July 1964) "Panaca Fair Is One of Biggest, Best," The Seattle Times, p. 41

Spafford, Michael (October 1972) "TAG," Puget Soundings, October 1972, pp. 20, 34-36

Further Reading

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Guenther, Bruce. Michael Spafford: Epic Works. preface by Lisa Dutton Spafford. Seattle: Lucia | Marquand publishing, 2018

Michael Spafford, "Impressions and Perspectives," Northwest Art News & Views, January/February 1970, pp. 8-9

External links

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Michael Spafford website https://michaelspafford.com/

Michael Spafford work (prints) represented in Seattle: Davidson Galleries  https://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/contemporary/michael-spafford/

Michael Spafford work represented in Seattle: Greg Kucera Gallery https://www.gregkucera.com/spafford.htm

Museum of Northwest Art (MONA) biography https://www.monamuseum.org/artist/michael-spafford

Archives of American Art oral history https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-michael-spafford-and-elizabeth-sandvig-12402

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