As a child Michael liked to color with crayons and markers. Also , he was very interested in stained glass windows and he enjoyed playing with shapes of colored glass on a light table in a stained glass studio. He spent hours putting the shapes together like puzzles and stacking the colors. Perhaps much of Michael's understanding of color was learned through these early experiences.
"Mountain of Gumdrops"
Park School, Michael's special school in Evanston, Illinois, shared a peer tutoring program with a nearby elementary school. Michael's young mentor taught him how to draw with basic shapes and they drew cars and trucks and Cape Canaveral together. At home Michael drew with magic markers on rolls of butcher paper. Eventually the gantries for the rockets (stacks of squares) evolved into apartment buildings and Michael drew colorful fantastic landscapes. At school Michael enjoyed the art classes and other opportunities to express his feelings: music, dance and drama. When a teacher told Michael that he is an artist, he took her seriously.
"Mountains"
Michael really needed to paint all day long, in his own studio space, and he needed to paint every day. The first paintings were colorfields. Even his earliest abstracts had movement, energy, and a sublime sense of color. When Michael decided that he wanted to paint cats, he had to learn a different way of thinking and seeing, how to control the brushes and paint, and how to fill the blank space of the paper. By painting every day for more than a year, Michael developed the fine motor coordination to manipulate his tools (and his handwriting improved too!!)
Michael needed to succeed. It helped when he could paint a small space at a time. For his early cat paintings, Michael traced pictures on acetate, made templates by cutting out the shapes, drew around the patterns, blocked off the cat shape, and painted the background first. Painting cats with seasonal themes inspired him to create interesting backgrounds and motivated him to keep working. At the end of 1994, Michael had a cat calendar printed from some of his images and walls of beautiful paintings. He was proud. (He carried that calendar everywhere and kept looking at it!! He even took it to bed with him and looked through it when he first woke up!!) Michael had mastered the basic techniques of painting (at his own pace) and had found the confidence to draw animals with basic shapes and paint them.
"Boston Dreaming"
In 1995 Michael started drawing cats and dogs together. Dogs are
harder because there are so many different kinds. In 1996 he began
painting flowers from still lifes and then adding animals from his
imagination. In 1997 Michael learned how to use oil paints and did
some self portraits.
As Michael's style of painting evolved, his sense of himself grew,
and he became a productive and more competent member of his community.
"Volcano" #6
