Growing Together © Mike Egan
Many artists rely on day jobs to get by, but few have had gigs as unusual as the one Mike Egan had when he was first starting out. The painter from Pittsburgh used to be an on-call embalmer. Among his former duties, he transported, dressed up, and did cosmetic work on the deceased.
Egan fell into the funeral industry a year after finishing his studies in printmaking and fine arts at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. “I was very drawn to the science part of it,” he says of his decision to enroll in the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science in 2000. “I was intrigued. I jumped in head-first and didn’t do any research.”
After receiving his Funeral Director/Embalmer diploma and landing the on-call embalming position, Egan often found himself waiting in his apartment for work. During the downtimes, he painted, and his current, morbid aesthetic developed. Halloween imagery and Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada were early influences, as were German expressionists like Otto Dix and Max Beckman, for whom death was a central theme. “When I was first starting out, I felt like I was mimicking what they were doing, but with my own style,” Egan says. “It kind of stuck with me, the death thing.”
Egan made skulls (which a classmate in third grade taught him how to draw) the central symbol of his work. Elements of devils, spirits, stained glass windows, crosses, and sacred hearts—all residual inspiration from his now-abandoned Catholic upbringing—also emerged. But the depictions of death aren’t the gory, frightening, or even uncomfortable variety. They’re almost celebratory, in a Day of the Dead way; a carnival of color and circular shapes and vivid skeletons.
Walking With My Friends © Mike Egan
Egan prefers painting these images on wood. “There’s a warmth to it,” he says. Using sandpaper, he can pull up old paint and begin again, or use amber shellac to add a yellow “antique-y” feel to a finished painting.
Art commanded more and more of his time and attention, and in 2006, Egan left the funeral industry. “I felt like I was married to my job. I didn’t feel like I was ever away from work,” he says. The decision has paid off; he has since shown in galleries in Portland, Austin, Philadelphia, London, and Lancaster; his next show opens on October 10 at the Gauntlet Gallery in San Francisco.
The response to his exhibitions, he estimates, has been 98 percent positive—and provokes a plethora of conversation. “A lot of people have e-mailed me and said, ‘Thanks for the work that you do. My husband just died recently and your work makes me think of him,’” he says. “For some strange reason, everyone finds a connection to my work.”
Egan’s style has already undergone substantial evolution, and he anticipates more will come. “The biggest thing that’s changed is my skill level of painting,” he says. “When I first started, I was doing really sloppy, almost Basquiat-type paintings. They were very crude. I drank a lot when I was in my early ‘20s and a lot of my paintings dealt with that.” While he plans to continue to work with wood, he wants to do larger paintings that tell stories with multiple characters in one painting.
When We Dream, We Dream You’ll Die © Mike Egan
As for death, Egan isn’t sure if it will dominate his artwork indefinitely. “I used to think about it, so much, all the time,” he says. “My health, the slightest little thing, ‘I’m going to die from this weird twitch.’ I guess I feel comfortable with it now. It isn’t something I find scary anymore.” Egan, 38, is taking better care of himself these days with diet and exercise. “I’m more concerned about living,” he says, “because I’m doing something that I love to do.”
