Artist’s Exotic Animal Posters Prove a Big Draw

The following scene has been played several times. Only the players have varied.

Mike Byergo, an energetic 37-year-old San Diego bachelor, is having dinner at the home of a new girlfriend. Her parents are there, too.

The conversation seems to be going pretty well. Byergo already has mentioned his hobbies--that he’s a jazz pianist, a scuba diver, underwater photographer and enthusiastic sky diver.

“And what,” the girlfriend’s father asks, smiling politely, “do you do for a living?”

“If I say I’m an artist, there’s a sudden silence,” Byergo said. The smile disappears from her father’s face. His next question, almost inevitably, is, ‘Are you working?’ ”

A wildlife illustrator, whose work is sold at every major zoo, aqua and animal park in the United States (and hundreds of overseas ones), Byergo works constantly.

“An artist, now, has to be about 20% artist and 80% businessman,” he said. “It’s against my personality to be a salesman, but I’ve had to buckle down to it. I wear a lot of different hats.”

Lots of Time at the Zoo

He often spends the mornings at the San Diego Zoo, taking hundreds of photographs, or riding around in a truck with a keeper, clutching a handful of hay, to get as close to the animals as possible.

“The average person looks at an animal, but they don’t really see them,” he said. “How many people could tell you how many lumps there are on a giraffe’s head?” (There are between one and five.)

“I’m a demon for accuracy. Well, most of the time. I don’t paint on the whiskers on (koalas) because it makes them look too much like rats.”

His afternoons are allotted to business. His father, retired from the Navy, helps him with shipping. His mother does some of the marketing. He himself spends many afternoons at the printers, anxiously supervising the process by which half a million dollars worth of machinery separates, by laser, the colors of his paintings so that they can be transferred to paper or cloth.

But it’s during the midnight hours--the hours from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.--that he creates, in vivid watercolors, the complex, mosaic-like wildlife posters that take five or six months to complete.

It’s also during those hours that owners of exotic pets--”And San Diego has a lot of them,” he said--bring his living models to his Kearny Mesa house. Rare lizards and snakes are the models he’s now working with.

“The fellow is an emerald tree boa,” he said, passing over a photograph showing him working at his drawing board with four feet of snake coiled around his neck and shoulders. “It had very big teeth.”

Whatever kind of teeth they have, none of his models, he stressed, have ever given him a hard time. Even during the months he spent constantly underwater, in Micronesia and the West Indies, researching for his “Tropical Saltwater Fish” and “Coral Reef Fish” posters, nothing ever bit or stung or lashed out at him.

Most Sharks ‘Friendly’

“Out of 300 species of shark, only nine will attack humans,” he explained cheerfully. “Most are very friendly. I’ve even pulled their tails.”

He was standing in front of his jungle-like patio as he spoke. (It comes in handy when he’s painting backgrounds.) Beside him, in a wrought-iron cage, a rainbow-billed toucan named Melon--”A man in a bar sold him to me, in a brown paper bag, when he was a baby,”--made duck-like quacking noises.

To the question “But, Mike--when do you sleep ?” he replied that he goes to bed at 4 a.m. and sleeps “until the first phone call of the day wakes me. Usually about 9 a.m.”

He has streamlined his home by keeping furniture to a minimum, and all of the paint white.

He’s also streamlined the time it takes him to decide what to wear each day, he said, by having 45 Hawaiian shirts made.

“I stumble to the closet, with my eyes half closed and put on the first one my fingers touch. There aren’t many places around here that you can’t go to wearing a Hawaiian shirt.”

Born on North Island, Byergo has lived “around here” for most of his life. He did spend the years 8-10 in Japan while his father was stationed there. The years from 18-22 he spent in Los Angeles, at the Art Center’s College of Design.

It is “known among illustrators as ‘The Boot Camp of Art Schools’ because of its strict discipline,” he said as he walked from his patio into the house. There was a blur of white feathers as a Moluccan cockatoo named Roy landed on the shoulder of the Hawaiian-shirt-of-the day.

“At the art center we spent the first four months drawing a white egg on a white plate, on a white cloth, with a mirror at the back. If you survive, it gives you a long span of attention.”

Fourteen years ago, when he first began doing his wildlife posters, which contain as many as 75 animals, or fish, or birds, entwined with an exotic background, Byergo worried about competition.

“But there hasn’t been any. Nobody seems to want to put six months into one poster.”

Mural at Sea World

Ten years ago he was offered the job of painting the life-size shark mural on the walls of Sea World’s new Shark Exhibit.

“I’ll never forget it,” he said. “The contract was $17,000. And that sounded pretty good. Sea World didn’t want me to put in the scenic background I wanted. Just that boring blue. I imagined it taking . . . oh, three to four months.”

Instead, it took Byergo and his friend and fellow artist Ron Shunk an entire year.

“We worked day and night. The kids that sold ice cream down there made more than Ron and I did.”

One of the major problems, he recalled, was a lack of specific information about sharks.

“Things like how many dots on a whale shark. Sea World wasn’t sure. We finally found a baby one in a jar at Scripps.

“We could have painted any number of dots, I guess . . .” He shrugged. “But millions of people from all over the world troop through that place. There’s a sense of pride in knowing that your work is accurate.”

Nowadays, Byergo said, he never leaves the house without seeing his own work somewhere. He sees it walking around on T-shirts. It zooms past him on the freeway on bumpers, stickers and decals. But it is the posters that seem to get around the most.

“I spotted one on the wall of a Marine Corps recruiting office. Hanging right next to a photo of General MacArthur,” he said, breaking into laughter. “And once, in the West Indies, I went into a little cafe, and there was my “Marine Tropical Fish” poster hanging on the wall. That’s really fun.”

His next poster, he said, as he walked into one of his two studios, will be a reptile one. A gecko lizard, another of his live-in models, sat, blinking, in a cage on the drawing board. Beside it squatted, motionless, a green-horned toad from Argentina.

He doesn’t expect that a reptile poster will sell well, though. “I’ll have to do a lion and tiger one to finance it. I’d love to do an insect poster . . . but you probably couldn’t give it away!”

Though San Diego has a lot of talented artists, Byergo said, few of them are overwhelmed with appreciation. In today’s world, talent does not automatically entitle the bearer to success.

Lack of Interest

“Wander around the La Jolla Museum of Art on a typical weekday evening, and you’ll see more guards than patrons.”

It disturbs him, Byergo acknowledged, that so many people don’t understand either art or artists.

“When Ron and I were painting the Sea World mural, there was this 9-year-old boy called Danny there, an Eagle Scout employee. He liked to hang around ‘helping us.’ ”

One day they put Danny on the scaffold with the airbrush in his hand--”only it was filled with water instead of paint”--and let him pretend to be painting.

“Thousands of people walked past. And not one caught on,” Byergo said. “In fact some of them said things like, ‘My! What a talented child!’ ”

Many genuinely talented artists, after struggling for a few years, give up, he said. They filter into other careers.

“Which isn’t always a bad thing! Ron gave up. Today, he’s considered possibly the best bird photographer in the world.”

“I’ve been very lucky. The gift shop merchandise buyers have become my patrons of the arts. They often commission and finance the works that I do.”

In recent weeks, whenever he’s been in an art store, Byergo has asked the women who work there what they think of the men who come in to buy art materials. How would they describe an artist?

“One said, ‘Unsuccessful.’ Another replied, ‘He’ll never make any real money.’ And a third one simply said, ‘Duds.’ ”

“That’s the way it is. Telling people you are an artist does not command their respect. I think if I ever find myself in the situation again of having dinner at a new girlfriend’s house, and her parents are there, and her father asks me what I do . . . I’ll tell him I’m a manufacturer.”