Biography
Bud Root-Michels’ early work as a commercial illustrator, graphic artist and logo designer employs the same tools as his abstract and realistic paintings today: strong graphic design, balance and weight, color theory, light and dark, yin and yang. 1974-96 he established the Bud Root Commercial Art and Design Studio in Anchorage, Alaska with local and international Fortune 500 clients. He won many first-place awards for his illustrations.
Growing up in Muskegon, Michigan, he had wondrous exposure to nature, but little to art. At 14, Bud enrolled in a two-year Art Instruction Inc. Illustration and Graphic Design Correspondence Course out of Chicago, Illinois. After four years active duty in the U.S. Navy, he enrolled in Woodbury Art College in Los Angeles, California where he studied color theory, architectural rendering, art history and illustration. In 1986 he taught several art courses at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Bud moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1999 to work at the Allan Houser Family Foundry to work on Allans sculpture waxes. Bud sculpted Allan’s life-sized portrait and participated in casting it in bronze. It was first exhibited at the 2001 Salt Lake Olympics. In 2002 this portrait was displayed at the Native American Smithsonian Museum, Washington D.C.
Bud’s paintings and sculptures are in private and corporate collections throughout the United States and internationally in Great Britain and Ireland.
