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The painter spends his days on the third floor of an ancient biscuit plant in a seedy section of industrial Ballard. The building, just a block from the Ballard Bridge, houses a collection of artists, mostly ceramicists whose main-floor kiln warms the warehouse through the winter.

But acrylic paint is the medium for Michael Schultheis, 39. A climb up steep wooden stairs, and we’re welcomed by Cesaria Evora’s alto voice singing in Portuguese from a paint-spattered boom box. “Ah, she’s wonderful,” says a similarly paint-spattered Schultheis standing at the door to his bright studio.

He is in the midst of creating paintings for a fall show at the Winston Wächter gallery in New York and a January show in Seattle. And as we start the interview, he spends the first 10 minutes moving canvases, hanging them in pairs and trios on the walls. “Just a little bit of gymnastics,” he grunts. “I’m sorry. I should have done this before you came.”

We disagree. It’s fun to watch him heave the large canvasses to their nails.

In his Ballard studio, Schultheis arranges canvases ready for a gallery show in New York City. His subjects include cycloids, paraboloids, lunes, and even riddles. Look closely, and you can see the equations as well as the physical shapes they represent.

The galleries want big paintings. Michael likes that. Their size allows him to interact with them in the same way he would a chalkboard. That is the first level of what he does—create a type of chalkboard. Then, drawing upon a past life as a software developer who has had to step up to the board and brainstorm, he writes on them. Years ago, he would have been part of a team mapping new programs on a dry eraseboard. Today he works alone, writing out theorems, mathematical equations, and geometric shapes on canvas.

He may be alone in his studio, but in his head he shares the company of Euclid, Albrecht Dürer, and Galileo, translating their ideas to color and form in paint.

Schultheis grew up on a wheat farm near Colton, about 12 miles south of Pullman. Impelled to Washington State University by a full-ride scholarship, he studied economics in the honors program. After graduation, he migrated west to find work. He also sought night classes in math at the University of Washington. He was accepted to Cornell for graduate school and, again on scholarship, studied there with plans of becoming a professor of labor economics. One of his favorite memories is of a statistics professor who would work out her equations on a chalkboard in front of the class. “She would start at one end of the board and go all the way across,” he says. “Then she would go back and sort of erase and create a window through the math and write something new. You could . . . see the memory of the equation underneath. Then in her wonderful New Delhi accent, she would pound on the board and say, ‘Isn’t this beautiful? Isn’t this elegant?’”

Schultheis thought, yes.

Though he loved math and economics and was following his dream, something was amiss, and Schultheis struggled with insomnia. He tried a drink before bed, medicine, and finally found solace in a $2.99 watercolor paint set. He kept painting after leaving Cornell with a master’s degree to return west to work as a software engineer. He did it all: landscapes, portraits, oils, pencils, paints.

But the genius idea of how to really capture his visions on canvas hit him as he was coming across the 520 bridge after work one night, listening to an artist on NPR. She said, quite simply, you have to paint what you know. He knew analytical math, economics, statistics. “So that’s where I began.”

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Continued

Click here to view an exclusive audio slide show narrated by Michael Schultheis, produced to accompany this Washington State Magazine article.

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Math meets art in the paintings of Seattle artist Michael Schultheis. The 1990 WSU economics alumnus draws from equations and theorems in creating his layered, colorful pieces. His efforts to blend art and math won him a solo exhibition at the national Academies in Washington, D.C. in 2005.