Drawing Primarily: Creighton Michael
 a brief and annotated history of my relationship with drawing

Part Two
Return to painting and Nature’s influence 

Akin to the Harcourt series of constructed drawings, Navigator explored strategies in developing three-dimensional painting as a product of assembled components that combined both actual and implied space. Like the four-part drawing of the same title, Navigator’s visual elements were inspired by the activities of a local pond.

Moving to the Hudson Valley from New York City in 1990 had profound effects on my work. I returned to painting after a fourteen-year hiatus but continued to make my sculpture as well as works on paper. Each of the disciplines would continue be informed by the dazzling array of natural patterns and structures, the mechanics of drawing, as well as the discoveries learned from various explorations.

The glimmer of moonlight filtering through a forest canopy was the inspiration for my first painting, Nocturne. 

The graphite drawings from the Edge series explored imaginary activities occurring between the land and water.

While my drawings discovered fictional narratives in nature, my paintings attempted to translate visual experiences into pattern often only using lines and circles as primordial symbols.

Intrigued by the cellular patterns in duckweed, I saw a relationship to the ink drawings of Yves Tanguy, which had been an early influence in my practice. However, duckweed’s formations are constantly shifting, continually altering its design. Though its appearance changes, it always remains duckweed. This revelation regarding a multiform entity not only created a new direction in my painting but also lead to the development of an innovative category of hybrid sculpture, dimensional drawing.

The incremental marking patterns that originated in Stir are further developed the Dust series of paintings.

While experimenting with gesso, I accidentally discovered that it was the perfect material to use as erasure for my works on paper having the added benefit of creating a fresh ground for additional marking.

With gesso, I could create near transparent layers that allowed both the drawing’s development as well as a vehicle for documenting its history. The concept of a four panel drawing series, Quad, was inspired by Richard Foreman's use of sensory overload in plays like Penguin Touquet, which I saw at the Public Theater in 1981.

Working with gesso, graphite, and shellac, I explored multiple facets of drawing, including “the marking episode”.

Borrowing the concept of synchronous viewing evident in the late ink drawings of Vincent van Gogh, I created a series of reed pen and ink drawings, titled Rhapsody (1998-2001). This was to better understand the dual nature of van Gogh’s mark, which exists simultaneously a document of past action as well as a unit of pattern. Unlike van Gogh’s pictorial renderings, the resulting imagery in my Rhapsody drawings was process driven, emerging from the quilting of multiple marking episodes varying in both duration and intensity. 

Encouraged by the dynamism discovered in the Rhapsody drawings, I began to evolve my marking vocabulary in the Notation paintings, which became something of a guide for the next decade. The four subsequent series, Mesh, Vestige, Innuendo and Pulse employed a developing, synthetic calligraphy with color to increase both spatial illusion and atmosphere. Incorporating mold stain into its marking mix, Haiku combines my hand with that of nature’s, referencing a space more often associated with traditional Asian landscape painting. 

The emotional impact of 9/11 moved my focus from exploring the vibrant patterns of the natural world to an inner space of self-reflection. In the following months, I returned to creating paintings using only lines and circles.

My decades long experiences with ocular migraines was the motivation and imagery for the Field series, which began in late 2001. The title, Field, short for “field of vision”was a fusion of painting, sculpture and drawing, structurally inspired by the curved ground of Medieval altar panels. Field with its layers of painted marks generates a spatial tapestry in which the viewer experiences the fragile nature of perception. 

Unlike the Field panels, the Squiggle paintings portray the arcs or auras associated with ocular migraines as a visual disturbance mimicking the effects often experienced during an episode. Both Field and Squiggle use repetitive chromatic patterns to produce atmospheric illusions. With Field, the space has a seemingly volumetric fluidity composed of transparent veneers, which contrasts from the agitated spaces in Squiggle, realized through multiple layers. In the Field panels, disruptions in the visual sphere are depicted as tears in the spatial membrane, not as an additional element as in Squiggle. Their formats differ as well. The Field series are on convex, linen covered panels, while the Squiggle paintings are on flat, stretched canvases. 

Pushing Squiggle’s vivid background to near opacity, the paintings in Veer trade the black and white rippling bands also associated with Squiggle for a ribbon-like gesture floating across the picture plane. Serving as a visual counter to the vibrant, vertical stream flowing behind it, the laterally suspended form teases the viewer with spatial ambiguity that maintains a fragile balance between figure and ground.

Impact is a series of oil paintings executed on concave panels, which explore the dynamism of gestures. Created  as a counter to the Field paintings, Impact with its interconnected marking episodes references in two-dimensional terms the drawing activity captured in the wall and floor pieces of the Rhapsody and Trace series.

Motif is a series of paintings utilizing two different marking styles with contrasting color systems, prismatic and pigmented. Composed of multiple layers of translucent acrylic strokes, the substructure is enveloped in an opaque calligraphic lattice of oil paint. The visual weight differential between the two-color strategies creates optical undulation throughout the picture animating its various networks.

By 2011 the impact of digital techniques and processes in my practice were becoming more evident. Frequency is a perfect example of analog and digital integration. 

Palimpsest is a document of marking episodes, eliminating commentary with a focus on the visual effects of emerging pattern. Calligraphic marks suspended between transparent acrylic sheets (pages) are layered on the painting’s surface to create an illusion of text hidden within a shifting motif. Palimpsest continues my deferred marking activity, first developed in 2008 with the Ply series. By 2013, the flat canvas plane is replaced by the structure of a concave wood panel to optically suspend the text layer above the surface. 

The Script series parallels the exploration and process that began with the Palimpsest series, but without color.

In 2011, the Backchannel series combined concepts and techniques that began while developing the Ply panels with recent digital achievements, which would alter the direction of my painting.