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Michael Ward
http://www.tmichaelward.com/michaelwardartist.htm
tmichaelward@att.net
I am a self-taught artist. I began my artistic career doing pen and ink renderings of historical architecture. In 1980, I turned to painting - first in gouache, then in acrylics. Nearly all my paintings are based on photographs I have taken, primarily of Southern California scenes, over the years. Though it was never my intention to depict nostalgic scenes, many of the images I have painted have disappeared or been radically altered in the ever-changing landscape that is Southern California. Thus nostalgia is thrust upon the works. But what I am really after is bearing witness, and making people stop what they’re doing and pay attention to something they may have never seen before, but that makes them feel “I know this.”
I am currently working on a series of house paintings. These simple, ordinary, unnoticed places have hidden interior lives, though they do not reveal them to us. The houses are from a variety of locations in the United States and Mexico. They are the place you grew up in, a place of nurture, experience, trial, memory and forgetting. They are all a common size, to symbolize our shared experience of being human.
Artists whose work I admire and draw inspiration from include Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Richard Estes and Vermeer. I am most interested in depicting what Alan Watts called the mystery of the ordinary; the workaday world we live in without seeing until we are forced to focus upon it, as in a painting.
Phyllis Lutjeans, Museum Educator and former curator, has said of my work: “Although Michael Ward may be called a neo-realist painter his work can ultimately be described as abstract realism. The picture image is photographically realistic, but within the context of the painting his compositions are complex and almost abstract. Deciphering the work section by section one sees how a multitude of individual complete compositions are put together to form the entire work. The viewer is confronted by a realistic image that puzzles and yet clearly tells the story simultaneously.”
SELECTED RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2010 The Neon Show, Austin Details, Austin, TX
2010 Art Kudos International Competition 2010, finalist
2009 California Open Exhibition, Long Beach Arts, Curator –S. Finnerty-Pyne
2009 Venice Free Clinic Art Auction
2009 Urban Ambience, Long Beach Arts, Mike Daniel, Juror
2009 California Dreaming -- Paintings of the Golden State, Tirage Art Gallery, Pasadena
2009 CA Visual Artists Group Show, 2nd City Council Art&Performance Space, Long Beach, CA
2008-9 Orange County Airport Community Focus Space (Solo show)
2008 Holiday Salon, Tirage Art Gallery
2008 Walkabout (Solo show), Gallery 825, Los Angeles
2008 Artist Showcase, The LAB, Costa Mesa, CA
2007 Art Kudos International Competition 2007 -- Peter Trippi, curator.
2007 Orange County Fair **** Mesa Art Gallery, Costa Mesa, CA
2007 Artists Magazine, 24th Art Competition, Finalist (2x), Landscape – P.T. Forrester, juror
2007 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Open Salon
2007 Crackerjack Group Show, Gallery 825, Los Angeles, J. Belloli, curator
2007 Venice Free Clinic Art Auction, Venice, CA
2007 Sexy Beasts Group Show, Art Murmur Gallery, Los Angeles
2007 TURF Group Show, Gallery 825, Los Angeles,
2007 (ongoing) Los Angeles County Museum of Art Rental Gallery
2007 Made in California, Brea Civic & Cultural Center, Brea, CA
2007 Centered on the Center, Huntington Beach Art Museum
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* None of the artworks may be copied or reproduced without the written permission of the Artist