We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Foster a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Michael, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
There have been many projects I’ve found meaningful over the years, especially if you’ve been in this game as long as I have. Early on, I worked in cable access television. Remember Wayne’s World? I lived that life throughout high school and college in the 1990s. I worked on a project that got the attention of some of the staff at Spielberg’s newly formed production studio, Dreamworks. I had just turned twenty-one and was developing a pilot episode for a potential television series while taking courses at a local university. The pilot episode was never picked up, but for me, it broke that mental barrier many artists suffer from. You can be successful in the arts. It is possible, even if unlikely. Creating television shows was also a hell of a lot more fun than what most young adults were up to during those times. Today, anyone can make a show with their phone if they want. In the early days of the internet and before the likes of YouTube, content creation was a bit more… unique.
My first love was always modern art and illustration, and for the last twenty years, I’ve been developing a body of work, paintings, and digital drawings, something I can feel good about. However, I recently finished writing a romantic comedy, “From Chicago to Osaka,” about a Chicago artist who goes to Japan for an art show and meets a potential soulmate. It was one of those Covid projects. Being stuck in the house for over a year gave some long-dormant ideas a chance to percolate. As of December 2022, we have a producer and some production staff, and we’re currently looking for a director. We hope to film in Osaka in the autumn of 2023 for a worldwide 2024 release. This script has been my most meaningful project to date because the process and the enthusiasm for the project from others (in Japan and the States) were so unexpected. And writing the story, which combined my love for Japan and Japanese culture with a skillset I haven’t used in quite a long time, it’s been a wonderful experience.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started drawing when I was four, yeah… that long ago. I distinctly remember doodling the cast of a Charlie Brown Christmas. I also remember being irritated that the characters looked so different from those I saw on television. To think, at the tender age of four, I am already that hyper-critical of my work! And I’ve been drawing ever since, always trying to get it right. Maybe one day I’ll get there.
I think illustration was the root of everything. I had a comic strip on and off for over two decades called “Larry’s Cafe,” with a solid run in the early 2010s, about an alien that ran a coffee shop. The alien, named Larry, was the straight man for all of the comical and, in many ways, emotionally troubled humans. I can relate to Larry. I was an odd kid who never felt like I fit in or belonged anywhere. I was the alien. The term for this now is imposter syndrome. Believe me, when I tell you, I will always be a reluctant imposter! (Laughs)
The nice thing about my career was that I always worked within many different disciplines. I made television shows, and my paintings have been in galleries around the country, creating comics, and illustrations, all of which helped my day job as an art director for various companies and organizations. It’s an excellent way to spend your days. I think Alan Watts said if you can make your work more like play, you’re doing it right. I’ve been lucky to say I’ve had much more fun working than I probably deserve.
If there’s one bit of advice I could give anyone starting in the field, the real secret is finding balance. I’ve worked day jobs, side jobs, and many long hours, but I’ve always made time for the kinds of projects I enjoy working on, whether whipping up a series of paintings or developing a screenplay. You have to pay the bills, so find a way to do that in a profession that’s as close to the arts as you can find. Be a designer, be a gallery owner, don’t become a dentist or a lawyer, and then paint on the weekends if you can help it. Your brain needs to be sifting in that creative world for as many hours as possible. It’s a numbers game when you come down to it. The more hours you spend in and around the arts, the better.
As for my art, it all starts with an emotion, idea, or concept which cannot be described easily with words. The kinds of powerful yet inconsolable emotions you feel when you watch a David Lynch film or read a Haruki Murakami novel. We all carry complex and abstract emotions we cobble together from our experiences. From a more technical standpoint, there are a few artistic design elements that I tend to fall back on, usually a person or character surrounded by lively abstraction representing information overload. A decade ago, I was fascinated by technology and its overwhelming impact on society. Now it’s all about the dangers of a world growing less stable by the day. The 2020s and 2030s will probably be difficult, from famine to geopolitical destabilization, the restructuring of supply chains, and population collapse, and the overall worldwide stats aren’t looking too great. I worry about the war in Ukraine and the unrest we’ve seen in places like Iran and China, which are the beginning of a period of uncertain global civil unrest. It will be up to the artists to help society emotionally define the period and to hopefully provide some insight and introspection to a rapidly declining global situation. Art is wonderful for infusing meaning into what might appear to be a series of meaningless events. That’s what art does. If anything, art can add perspective and keep us a bit more settled during unsettled times.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Do you want to hear about my resilience? I can’t tell if I’m resilient or just too dumb to find a legitimate vocation. I don’t know. I just always knew what I wanted to do with my life. I had to be somewhere in and around the arts. Sometimes the mediums I’ve worked in have changed, but it’s always circled around the concept of being creative. That’s just my thing. I’m stuck working in cloud cuckoo land. Like when Al Pacino faces off with Robert DeNiro in the famous diner scene in the movie “Heat” (1995) when they both defiantly declare they don’t know how to do anything else and don’t want to either. Of course, working in the arts isn’t nearly as nail-biting or life-threatening. In the end, you realize at some point in your life that being a doctor or an engineer isn’t going to be a good career choice for your skillset, and that’s just fine.
It’s hard to pinpoint one event in over twenty years in the business. I think it’s the accumulation of twenty years. Actually, it’s more like twenty-five years now. Sheesh. Maybe that’s the sign of true resilience. I’ve forgotten how long I’ve needed to be resilient. I think the fact that my career has survived the Dot Com bust and the Great Recession stands for something.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
This would be an entire article by itself. Growing up, it was Charles M. Schulz. I was obsessed with “Peanuts.” The masterful way he combined that level of wit with an esthetically simple and minimalist expression of character design is, to this day, extraordinary. I have cherished my collection of “Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting” book by Phaidon. I also love my Taschen copy of “Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.” If I had to pick a favorite painter, it would have to be Edward Hopper. His painting, “Nighthawks,” is one of my favorite objects on this planet. I love that it’s in Chicago, and I can hop in a car and drive to see it if I need to.
And then there’s my love for Japanese culture. For sheer crowd-pleasing entertainment, Makoto Shinkai’s anime “Your Name” (2016), a body-swapping comedy, unfolds into a teen version of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004). I love that film, too. “A Silent Voice” (2016), a Japanese animated teen drama from Kyoto Animation, directed by Naoko Yamada and written by Reiko Yoshida, is probably the greatest anti-bullying film ever made. If you love Kurosawa films, everyone always defaults to “Seven Samurai,” which is a masterwork. I like his smaller movies, “Ikiru” and “Drunken Angel.” If I were pressed to pick a favorite, it would be “Rashomon.”
As for Japanese novels, I mean… Haruki Murakami. “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” (1997) and “Kafka on the Shore” (2004) are not just great Japanese books; they are some of the best fiction ever written, period. Then there’s the devastating unrequited love story of “Norwegian Wood” (1987), the missing person mystery of “Sputnik Sweetheart” (1999), and the wry humor of the soft-boiled detective story “A Wild Sheep Chase” (1982). As a kid, I read through the entire catalog of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. As an adult, it’s been the works of Murakami.
As for artists I love, Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Edward Hopper, Pia Fries, Cy Twombly, Egon Schiele, Hebru Brantley, Yayoi Kusama, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Shigenori Soejima’s work on the Persona series… and that’s just off the top of my head.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://boojazz.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boojazzstudios/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fosterscafe
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-foster-1747b245/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmWIDXebp9XGPCm68h_wbIQ
Image Credits
Boojazz Studios