UKIYO-E
Pictures of a floating world

This recent series of images brings together two of Michael’s continuing interests; the way that images are physically composed, and the use of cloth as a drawing material.
Composition is a balancing act, you follow a conscious urge to create a certain kind of image, while at the same time try to remain open and respond spontaneously to what is present in the moment ; a kind of shaping of the unbounded.
Cloth is a material that works in broad generalities using big shapes, it is responsive to gesture and movement. It effortlessly enables a sort of mark marking that makes the process of working with it much like the act of painting.
Using cloth in the way stops Michael getting tangled up in detail and assists in simplifying the content so that the proposition and its resolution can be appreciated simultaneously.
The tension between the urge to compose and the desire to respond spontaneously has shaped and informed these images lending them a certain aesthetic which uses as its reference point the genre of Ukiyo-e; pictures of a floating world.