About Michael
I was issued a flat world at birth. Diagnosed with blindness in my right eye, I had a distinctly unique way of looking at my surroundings, seeing the world as two-dimensional. I started drawing birds as a kid on a scrappy easel nailed high up in a tree or sitting next to my severely handicapped sister at the kitchen table, drawing with her crayons the animals whose names she screamed. I still paint birds and other creatures, now from photos or quick sketches I’ve done while volunteering at the Wildlife Center of Texas and out in nature.
My travel, illnesses and mentors led me to “sacred geometry,” the symbolic and sacred patterns found in nature, which provides the structure for my compositions. In my acrylic paintings, I add creatures floating on top of these designs of lines, shapes, color, or keys. On antique prints by naturalists documenting discoveries of new species of plants and animals, I add geometric designs based on new discoveries in quantum physics. I paint the ordinary creature – sparrow, snake, shell – and make it disclose what was hidden in it.
The birds, butterflies, keys, funnels, shells, and other symbols often grab the viewers’ attention and then they get stuck in the loops of the geometry, only to find other hidden symbols. Strangers often share very personal memories about their encounters with a specific bird: mystical, sad, humorous or healing. Blending science, spirituality, philosophy and geometry, I try to create artwork in a variety of media that contain those feelings and energetic downloads.
My right eye gives me the plane, and my left eye gives me the light. My painting is what happens when these two systems negotiate. A bird in profile cannot be seen from two sides at once and is the shape of my own perceptual condition. I am not painting birds, I am painting the one-eye problem, over and over, resolving it each time. A seashell is a spiral that closes in on itself, and a funnel is an aperture that looks back at me. I read both as eyes in the same context.
I am currently working on a series of acrylic paintings and collages of animals and plants I experienced daily the last several years while living in rural Texas. I’m aiming to reveal the worth already woven into nature and forgotten spaces. I’ve returned to using the moon, sky and stars to function as an alchemical light, exposing where the magical has been hidden.
