Michael received his BS from Buffalo State College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Michael's artwork has been exhibited since 1980 at venues such as: The Burchfield Penney Art Center, Nina Freudenheim Gallery, The New York State Museum, Albany, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, Rutgers University and The Fashion Institute Of Technology. Michael's work is included in the permanent collection of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center and numerous private collections.
Currently, the two predominant currents in my painting are realist landscapes and cloudscape abstractions.
My studio is at Niagara Hall in the historic Prospect Hill Neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. The studio overlooks our water boundary with Canada. The juxtaposition of an intensely urban environment with the nexus of Lake Erie and the Niagara River provides a daily reminder of our altered landscape. These paintings are influenced by such contrasts, not unlike the Hudson River Painters, who valued the beautiful and awesome aspects of nature in a landscape that was no longer pristine. This work stems from that American landscape tradition focusing on the various manifestations of the sublime. They are intended to be celebrations of our atmospheric, meteorological and geographical attributes which still gives rise to unexpected wonders.
The working title for this series is "Peaceable Kingdom".
While this series derives from the same inciting motivations as the realist paintings: The cloudscape/abstraction paintings represent the atmospheric poetry of pollution and weather made visible along Buffalo's waterfront. These cloudscape/abstractions depict fleeting effects that unravel into improvised descriptions of nature's underlying forces. This paradoxical combination of the objective (observation/realism) vs. the subjective (improvisation/abstraction) are intended as meditations on transience and the infinite in nature.