From Pharmacy to Fine Art: The Creative World of Mike LaRosa

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. Today we are exploring creativity and the human spirit with Mike LaRosa of LaRosa Studios, who indeed is creative in a similar way to members of our profession, the healthcare profession, because in addition to being an artist, he's also a pharmacist. So welcome, and I'm very interested to talk to you about how you're blending together these elements of your personality.

Mike LaRosa: Absolutely. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: So Mike, you and I met first at the Yarmouth Clam Festival.

Mike LaRosa: That's correct.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. You had a beautiful little booth with some wonderful art, and at that time you weren't represented by the Portland Art Gallery. Now you are represented by the Portland Art Gallery. It's very exciting, but it's very different from the work that you've done as a pharmacist. So I want to hear about that. How did you go from, I'm doing this very clinical thing to, I'm doing this very artistic thing, and what are some of the interesting learnings you've had?

Mike LaRosa: That's a very interesting question. I've been painting professionally now for eight years as my own business. I've been drawing and painting as a recreation, as a passion that I love for over 10 to 15 years. And I think that you can have both. You can have an analytical, mathematical science type of mind, but you can also pursue the arts. I've always wanted to pursue a path in the arts, and I'm here to say, you can do both. You can do both. So it's what really drives me as my passion creatively, and I'm very fortunate that I have an opportunity to do that and to also do my other career as a pharmacist. So it is the best expression for me to have those two opportunities.

Lisa Belisle: Growing up in Syracuse, New York, did you already know you wanted to become a pharmacist or did you have a sense that there was a different direction that you would be taking in your life? How did you get to even being a pharmacist in the first place?

Mike LaRosa: I always excelled in math and science, and I knew I wanted to help people. I wanted to be involved in the healthcare community. I saw what people were doing in the healthcare community and the opportunities that were there, and I saw that as the best fit for myself. I have a prior background in engineering, so a lot of math and science based, but I just didn't get the fulfillment that I feel that I could have gotten in a career. So I went back, I changed my path. I went to pharmacy school, I did it. We lived in Philadelphia for five years, went to school there, and here I am now.

Lisa Belisle: That's a big deal. So you're already established in engineering.

Mike LaRosa: Correct.

Lisa Belisle: And you take a right turn and you have to put everything on hold to get that education. So there really was something about either something that pushed you or pulled you towards taking that right turn.

Mike LaRosa: Yeah, it was a risk, but the same thing with the artwork that I'm producing. It's a risk. I don't have a technical basis or a schooling of art in my past to fall back on. I'm not classically trained, but I think what I make up for with that is a drive and a passion to be successful and to express what I really feel. And so I have a lot of drive to say what I want to say and do what I want to do.

Lisa Belisle: So this piece that you've brought today is a really interesting combination of curves and lines and a lot of bright colors, but also some, they almost seem desert, like the color palette. So talk to me about this piece and what your intention was as you were beginning to create it.

Mike LaRosa: Really it is to make a statement, turn people's heads, get people talking about it, say enough that you need to say on the canvas and then let the people's imagination do the rest. The idea is to put that on a wall on display and you could fill in the gaps. The imagination of myself when I'm creating it and the other people that are viewing it, they can really make their own judgment on it and put it together and say, okay, that's a nice work of art. I see shapes. I see how they can relate together in just enough ways for me to say, that's a great piece of work.

Lisa Belisle: So this is a piece that you've called Maine Island. Was it inspired by any islands in particular?

Mike LaRosa: Deer Isle. It's up on the north coast of Maine. We will visit, me and my family, Stonington, Maine, where we go to Aragosta almost on a yearly basis. And it's a special place for us and my three-year-old, and we're very inspired by that landscape up there and that region particularly.

Lisa Belisle: How does your three-year-old like Aragosta?

Mike LaRosa: He loves it. He loves it. Yeah. We go on hikes and he loves the outdoors and it's really great to share it with him.

Lisa Belisle: So in looking at this piece, it is the beige and the tans and the browns of the beach on the bottom, but then you've got this really brilliant expansive sky across the top. Is that the way that you experience that region when you're up there?

Mike LaRosa: Correct. Yeah. I think it is a "you take it all in" type of immersive experience. So the colors take you in, the ground and the rocks and the structure, they all combine and take you in. So it's a total experience. You don't feel detached or perhaps like you're trying to figure out how it all comes together. It does come together for you and you find that feeling when you see this all immediately. So it's not something that you need to work to come to. The work comes to you.

Lisa Belisle: In looking at your pieces, it's easy to see that there's travel inspiration. In fact, you have some pieces that we looked at that were Cinque Terre, for example.

Mike LaRosa: Correct.

Lisa Belisle: How much traveling do you do in your life these days?

Mike LaRosa: Not as much as we used to. In our thirties before kids it was quite more frequently, twice a year. Now, maybe once a year we get out to Europe or we travel up and down the Maine coast. But travel was a very big inspiration for a lot of my works just because you get out, you experience different locations and settings and it's incredibly inspiring. The Italy trips that we made in the mid 2010s were very inspiring to me. Just the colors, the landscapes, and how you could make them all work together was very, very inspiring.

Lisa Belisle: Your wife is a family practice doctor like me.

Mike LaRosa: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So of course she must be a wonderful individual because family practice doctors are pretty wonderful.

Mike LaRosa: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: If I do say so myself, but I'm wondering, obviously you have a shared understanding of healthcare because you have that you're doing professionally. How much art and creativity and how much of this other side of you does she engage with?

Mike LaRosa: Well, my wife approves and she's supportive and she is there to suggest and come up with different ideas, or you should look at it this way. And sometimes she's been very, very helpful in steering me in the different directions and different aesthetics. She's not artistic. She has a sense for design and a sense for place and a sense for order. Whereas I think when I, as the person creating the work, there's a lot of disorder that you have to go through to arrive at the artwork. So she is the other side of this equation that keeps me in line, keeps me in check. She'll say, do one of those or make it more like this. And most of the time she's right.

Lisa Belisle: I really love that. So she is artistic. She's just maybe not a painter.

Mike LaRosa: That's correct. She has a great mind. She is a great appreciator of art. Some people might not be an artist, but they know what's great art. That's my wife, that's Laura.

Lisa Belisle: How did the two of you end up in Norway, Maine of all places?

Mike LaRosa: We were living in Philadelphia in Center City. We had just graduated. We didn't know where we wanted to go. Had really no plan where we were going to end up. And she ended up with an interview in Norway, Maine. We drove up, it was in the middle of winter, there was a blizzard. We were lucky to get in a house. They put us up for the night for Laura's interview the next day and the interview went fantastic. Laura met with the practitioners in the hospital and we were blown away. We knew we wanted to be somewhere with land and space and opportunities for the winter months, skiing, hiking, access to the ocean in the summers. It checked all the boxes for us. It was a big detour from city life, but that was enough for us and it was time for a change. It was time to move on.

Lisa Belisle: When I met you at the Clam Festival and you had your own space and you're there and you are representing your work, you are essentially the artist, but you're also essentially a small business owner.

Mike LaRosa: Correct.

Lisa Belisle: And you've been that up until the time that you became affiliated with the Portland Art Gallery. You're really looking at your own spaces and you're interacting with your clients and you're seeing what sells and what doesn't sell. That's very different than working for a healthcare organization or really working for anybody, being in your own business. So what types of things have you learned as you've not only needed to create your art, but also put it out into the world to see if people will buy it?

Mike LaRosa: Just a sense of time management. It's a sense of learning to adapt. There's a great phrase. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. So I think that was, and still is, a great way to describe the aspects of being in the small business and responsible for a small business. But sometimes you're waking up at four or five in the morning to get ready for the next show. There's a checklist that you may or may not have, or there's a checklist in your mind of what you need to do to make this a success for the next show. What are people going to respond to? Most of my work I paint for myself. I know what I want to do and I'm not thinking too hard about an audience or what's going to satisfy this group or this demographic. I paint great art that I love and that I really cherish and I know other people will as well. So yeah, there is a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of learning that I've picked up along the way. But like I said, it's motivation. It all comes from love. Love is the first. It is the number one. So you start with that and it's amazing what you can achieve.

Lisa Belisle: So when you say it all comes from love, love of being an artist, love of creativity, love of...?

Mike LaRosa: Love of color, love of putting the paint on the canvas. I think about works that I've done that I'm going to do. I've had dreams of brush strokes. I have dreams of how layers can go onto layers, and of how colors interact. And it's like four o'clock in the morning and then you wake up and now let's do that. Let's make that happen. That's what I'm doing this for. This is where it all starts. This is what the driving force is.

Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about the straight edge work and how you came to a place where you really appreciated that enough that you wanted to learn more about it and that you wanted to make that part of your ongoing creative work.

Mike LaRosa: Clean, crisp, just really clean lines. I loved the way that when you have hard edges, you look at it, you know exactly what you're looking at. It's just the clean look. It is just very refined. When you hear a piece of music, you can hear every note and everything's crisp and it makes sense. And I just love that way of artwork and boundary color making sense together. And that was a good starting place for me. I've gone in different directions ever since that, but I've always fallen back to a hard edge style where there's definite boundaries, there's definite connections.

Lisa Belisle: Describe your process.

Mike LaRosa: Very great question. Landscape works, I start with a drawing. I start with photographs in mind, something that inspires me. I have colors that I have in the back of my head that I want to express. Work like this, for instance, is very premeditated. I have definite colors, definite medium. It's a very thick, viscous medium. You get a glossy sense of real definite firm fundamental color. Abstract works are much more trial and error. And those really push me in a different direction to find my way. So that's a lot of searching. There's a lot of searching in the abstract works. So when I'm in the frame of mind to see where this can go and make some reaching and searching, that's the abstract works. But yeah, there's a lot of different ways to go about achieving a great painting.

Lisa Belisle: So you mentioned this idea of discomfort with your small business when you're doing abstract work and that lack of clear definition and clear path. Is that uncomfortable at all for you?

Mike LaRosa: Yeah, so I've gone through certain works where you almost start over. You can paint over it. I've painted over, and in some cases you black out and you start over again. But then what you achieve is texture. You achieve more ideas. That's a very good point because not everything is, you don't always have one idea and then you see it through straight. A lot of my artwork is keeping every idea open on the table and being receptive to things that come. Sometimes I'll be in the studio with different mediums, a dozen different brushes, different sizes, and there's a fierce activity, there's an energy of what am I going to grab at any moment because ideas are happening very quickly and you have to be ready to respond to them. So it could be very intuitive, and you have to be responsive when you're doing an abstract work for myself.

Lisa Belisle: So I find that really interesting because I know as an engineer and as a pharmacist, there's a lot of precision involved.

Mike LaRosa: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: There's not a lot of abstraction toward at least standard pharmacy. I suppose there could be some if you're doing maybe compounding work, for example, but you need to be very precise in your current healthcare job. As an engineer I don't think there was a lot of it, I think you need to figure things out and come up with an answer.

Mike LaRosa: Correct.

Lisa Belisle: So how do those things interplay in your mind and your personality and in the way that you approach the world?

Mike LaRosa: In work like this, for example, that was very precise. So that was very calculated and very time consuming, and you have to be ready to go that way, but also you have to be receptive to changing it up and going a different route if needed. I think it just all depends on the situation and what the situation calls for and yeah, it's just being prepared and ready for what comes your way.

Lisa Belisle: That's a great answer. Yeah. I think it is interesting when your brain is trained a certain way, but then you say, but I need my brain to act this way today. I need to have over here, I need linearity. And over here I need space.

Mike LaRosa: Correct.

Lisa Belisle: But you have to be able to have those neurologic pathways work on your behalf either way.

Mike LaRosa: That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's the fun of it. That's what makes it fun is there's no right or wrong in the art world so much. There's just all kinds of opportunity. I love the opportunity.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about some of your inspirations, some of the artists who have inspired you or some of the visual inspirations that you've had that have led you to the type of work that you're currently doing.

Mike LaRosa: Yeah, that's an interesting question. Honestly, I didn't grow up around museums. I didn't grow up in a painting family. I didn't come to know about great artists and great artwork until later in my teens and early twenties. I grew up around movies and TV and I was very inspired by classical movies, by great classic directors, by music, jazz music. So I think in my work, I wanted to communicate a sense of, I wanted to tell a story. You get a certain sense when you watch a movie of feeling and how can you condense that into one painting? And when you look in the painting, do you see sound? Do you see set design? Do you see color? Do you see costumes? I think about all of that. I don't know if the audience would, but I'm thinking about all the elements that go into the painting to tell the story. So my works are not static. They're very dynamic. They work like sound. You can bend sound, you can hold a note, you can put notes together, you can put colors together. You could put boundaries together. I think that there's a lot of that going on in my work.

Lisa Belisle: For people who have gone down a path in their lives and maybe they've found, I'm not sure if this was the right path. Maybe I wasn't meant to be an engineer. I'm going to try a different professional career. I'm going to go back. I'm going to become an artist perhaps. What advice would you give?

Mike LaRosa: If you're going to love it, if you're going to lead with passion, if the number one, yeah, if the general is love. Love leads the army, go for it. Yeah, that's all I can say about that.

Lisa Belisle: Was there advice that you wish that somebody had given you along the way or somebody gave you so that you felt like you had the courage to pursue these paths?

Mike LaRosa: Maybe, but I have no regrets. I would say I saw people going into art school. I wish that I had that opportunity. I always believed that I had to go into sciences and that a more fulfilling career might be in sciences or math or more technical based. And I think that looking back at it, I'm still happy with where I am, but I believe that I got something back. So I got the best of both worlds now. I'm blessed. I'm blessed. Yeah. It would've been different if I had gone to art school, if I was more classically trained and had those more skills in background. I don't know. But I am happy with where I'm at and yeah, I have taken a few classes here and there from classical artists, and I'm always learning.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm very excited for you. I'm excited that I had the chance to meet you at the Clam Festival and to see what you were bringing into the world already. But I'm excited that you've affiliated with the Portland Art Gallery because it's a tremendous community of artists. And now having had the opportunity to listen to many, many of their stories, I have the sense that you probably will find some connection within the members of the Portland Art Gallery community and some kindred spirits. And I'm really pleased that you took the time out of your very busy schedule to come here and have a conversation with me today.

Mike LaRosa: Well, I'm thrilled. I couldn't be more appreciative and thankful for the opportunity to talk with you. And yeah, I couldn't be more excited to be a part of the gallery. I am very, very thrilled about my work coming up, and I think this time is probably the best time in my life for painting. And what's coming ahead is very, very exciting.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I agree. Great things to come. I'm looking forward to it. Great things to come. Yes. I'm Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. And today I am absolutely celebrating Mike LaRosa from LaRosa Studios and now the Portland Art Gallery in his artistic work, but also your healthcare work. And I appreciate the opportunity to spend time with him today. I hope you take the opportunity as a listener or watcher to go online to see his work at the Portland Art Gallery's website or come meet us at an upcoming art gallery opening. I know that Mike, at some point you'll be having a show with the art gallery.

Mike LaRosa: Absolutely.

Lisa Belisle: So it's been great to talk with you today.

Mike LaRosa: Thank you very much. This was a pleasure. Thank you very much.