05 Mar Artist Spotlights: Michael Charron Meets His Demons

Patrick Michael Charron Stevens Jolly is a native of Detroit, a graduate of Western Michigan University, holds a BFA in sculpture, is a father, a grandfather, an art dealer, a recovering alcoholic, a painter, a woodsman, a prickly pickleball player, a printmaker, and a seeker of ethereal truths. At his core lies the soul of an artist. Let’s call him Mike.

Here’s how Mike’s path to becoming an artist veered off course for a couple of, well, decades. After earning a degree in sculpture and winning major awards and honors, including two prestigious Ford Foundation grants, he married and took a job in construction, running an asphalt crew. Why? Good question.

“My proclivities for a hedonistic life,” he explains, “produced my first son.” He left asphalt when he found work selling original Audubon prints for an art distributor. After several years learning the business by literally pounding the pavement and making some 200 cold calls a day, Mike went out on his own. But instead of making art, he represented other artists as Patrick Jolly. And he was good at it, probably because he possesses an innate understanding of what makes a work of art worth owning. To this day, his clients are completely dedicated to him. Even people who have only known him for a few months consider him a close friend and ally, which he is.   

Celestial Getaway | Oil on Canvas | 48 x 60 inches

Funny, though, how life keeps throwing curveballs at you until you get the message. Patrick Jolly, the art advisor, thought that being a businessman in the art world would keep him close to his dream of being an artist and provide a stable income. What it offered, however, was a boom-and-bust existence that exacerbated his drinking problem and destroyed a couple of marriages. Standing next to one’s dream, it turns out, is harder than being a million miles from it.

And what’s with all those names? Patrick Michael Charron was six when his dad died. His mom eventually remarried a great guy named Dick Stevens. But Stevens died tragically of an aneurysm — Mike was there and tried to resuscitate him while his mom called for an ambulance. After Stevens’ death, Mike’s mom reached out to the high school and told them her teenage sons had just lost their father, and could someone keep an eye on them? Coach Jolly was tapped for the job, and the brothers soon looked up to him as a father figure, which, of course, won over their mother, who has been happily married to Coach Jolly for the last 51 years and counting.

Mountain Shadows | Oil on Canvas | 6 x 9 inches

Mike’s world, however, was anything but blissful. In fact, it was spiraling out of control. In his art-dealing days, he sold hundreds of paintings to major collectors while trying to eke out time to paint for himself. But the drinking had become all-consuming. What no one, not even Mike, knew was that it was masking bigger demons.

“I thought everybody drank like I did,” he says. “Like, everybody’s leading a life of quiet desperation.” His first day on the path to sobriety started the morning of July 17, 2000, after a particularly stellar day and night of drinking. That morning, while standing at his front door, trying to remember if he’d hidden a bottle of vodka in his truck, it occurred to him that he should either quit drinking or “go pro,” meaning, let the booze fully take over, just give up and find a place under a bridge where he could openly drink his life away. He checked himself into rehab. That’s where Drunk Mike learned he’d been self-medicating a bipolar condition in an attempt to smooth out the manic highs and devastating lows.

Mike had been painting some before getting sober, but in sobriety, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands, time previously taken up with drinking. “I’d spent my whole life drinking,” he says. “How do you do life without drinking? How do you go bowling without drinking? How do you dance? So, I substituted painting for drinking.” He also began shifting from selling art to making art.

Intimacy with the Unknown | Oil on Canvas | 36 x 48 inches

The problem was that everyone knew him as Patrick Jolly, the art dealer. His solution: Paint under the nom de plume, Michael Charron.

There are as many layers to Michael Charron’s paintings as there are to his life. Raised a Roman Catholic, he has always been deeply curious about the Catacomb and Incorruptible Saints. Since college days, he has written prayers, what he calls “little communions,” on his canvases, then painted over them.

After getting sober, he started dedicating weeks at a time to trekking into Colorado’s backcountry, accompanied by llamas laden with painting gear and supplies; a ritual he continues to this day. On these plein-air painting trips, he brings small panels on which he writes affirmations, then paints over those words.

Apparitio Sancti Catacumbae | Mixed Media | 27 x 23 inches

Back home in his studio, he launches into larger works based on his studies. On studio works, he underpaints illustrated prayers and depictions of saints, such as Saint Catherine of Bologna, patron saint of artists. You’d have to X-ray his paintings to see what deity lies beneath the luminous landscape that sits atop. Or maybe it’s better to know that below the warm light and natural harmonies of his landscapes, there’s a prayer.

Yes, Michael Charron, the artist, is the alter-ego of Patrick Jolly, which means they are one and the same. But it is through the act of making art — painting, assemblage, and printmaking — that there is a joining of the many diverted paths Mike’s traveled, the demons he’s slayed, and the past he’s continually confronting through his art, not as failures but simply as life: one strange, beautiful life.

Michael Charron is represented by Mia Valley, valleyfineart.com, and Susan McGrady at shoplowrider.com.

Ann Glaser is a Colorado art advisor and writer focusing on contemporary artists of the American West.