Artist's Statement

When I started painting, it was only as a hobby, a way to relax. The act of creation made me feel a sense of calmness and joy that I couldn't access in the hectic world. Soon, though, as I began to better understand the nuances and requirements of craft, I saw painting as art. While it still has a certain therapeutic quality for me, painting has revealed itself as a process capable of addressing a range of emotions, some painful, some joyful, but none ordinary or indifferent. My hope, then, is that when a viewer sees one of my paintings, he feels something new. Whether it's a sensation of pleasure or pain, I want the viewer to be moved out of his ordinary world, and into an emotional place he never knew existed. This will create not only a sense of awareness for the viewer, but also a sense of connection both to me, the painter, and to other viewers. Though we won't all share the same experience of the painting, we will all share something powerful and profound. We will all have an experience we otherwise wouldn't have had.

About Mike's Photography

Not long after he bought an Iphone, Mike realized an as yet untapped creative possibility for digital photography. While still something of an experiment, Mike's Iphone photos constitute an intriguing blend of cutting edge technology and old-fashioned human constraint. It is, paradoxically, the poorness of the Iphone's digital camera that gives Mike's photographs their unique feeling of movement and immediacy. A better digital camera would take more stable but duller picture, but a traditional camera would not be able to capture quite the same slice of a world in constant flux. Mike's photographs are printed on high quality metallic halide paper, which gives them a pearlescent feel. Photography has lately come to interest Mike because, unlike most media, its scale is almost unlimited.

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