A short Bio

Michaels says he was “born in the South…South Brooklyn” as in “You can take the boy out of the South but not the South out of the boy.” The stick ball and Italian fruit vendors an undying impression.

In 1951, Robbie Michaels’ father took the three year old boy out to see a drinking buddy who lived on the tip of eastern Long Island. As the story goes, the senior Michaels, a draftsman with an engineering firm located in lower Manhattan, had been stopping off at a little gin mill down in the Village on University place before heading home on the train to Brooklyn. In the course of a beer and far ranging discussions about drawing, art and the cosmos. He befriended several then notorious if not already noticed artists who were later became somewhat infamous as the center of the so called New York School; some of whom invited him to their lairs be it a cold water flat on the lower east side or a bucolic run down farmhouse on Long Island.

Thus a three year old was introduced to the godfather of abstract impressionism, Jackson Pollock, on a perfect Saturday morning in the fall of that year.

Pollock was at the time working on a piece that was later to be called Blue Poles and the canvas was sprawled out raggedly on the floor of his shack of a studio. As the men sat there staring at the inchoate work Pollock said “here, let the kid throw some paint on it”.

So if you have the occasion to view the now celebrated piece and look carefully down in the lower right corner, you’ll see something that looks like a black “9”; the artistic contribution of the three year old Michaels.

Or so the story goes.

Then there is the moment of realization when, while a Curtis, he sees El Greco’s St. Matthews Passion and the elongated, tortured and distorted but perfect figures transcend the space around the picture and the entire gallery.

This seals the deal and Michaels is off into the painterly world of abstraction with craft tempered by the angel’s hand of fortune.

Thus, as you scan through the works herein look for some of these atavistic qualities. And to bring it full circle view the five piece set of panels, “Reflections on the Cedar Tavern School”.

The rest is history.

Drogo Yankovich, Artist Management

The Michaels Gallery