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| C Michael Wiswell |
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I was born, November 23, 1946, in Seattle. My parents eventually settled in West Seattle in the house where I grew up. I went to Schmitz Park Elementary, James Madison Junior High and West Seattle High School. After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Washington, then on to the University of Western Washington where I received my degree in fine arts. Jobs for long haired hippies with degrees in art weren’t too plentiful in those days, so I kept on painting. I produced and sold many paintings at several galleries in the area. Actually, I have been producing art since I was 15. I began selling my work first to local West Seattle residents, then to greater Seattle and Bellevue collectors. Eventually my works scattered as far as the Bellingham area and Spokane. Successful as I was, I couldn’t make a living for the family I had started by then. So I was forced to take a job. My first real job was with a surveyor. A friend of mine, who worked for the surveyor, persuaded him to view my work and consider me for the position of drafter. That launched my career as a drafter. From ’74 to ’95, I worked for some of the Northwest’s most prominent engineering firms, including Weyerhaeuser and Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire. Among my most memorable projects was the North Addition to Husky Stadium and the AT&T Tower. By 1995, though, I was developing a mental illness, bipolar disorder. Working in a professional environment proved to be too stressful for me and I had to resign. Since then I have been doing what I love to do most: painting.
What makes my story unique is my art. The way I paint today started in 1969, for me, when I walked in to a bookstore in the U district and found a book entitled Dynamic Symmetry by Jay Hambidge. But you could say it started about 3500 BCE by the ancient Egyptians. Ironically, it may have been surveyors who first used the device which enabled them to mark off a square and thus accurately laid out rectangular fields, lots and properties and so on. That device was a cord having enough knots in it to make equal spaces, 3 by 4 by 5, on the sides of a triangle. This led to the ability to make a square, cube, pyramid, not to mention any size or proportion of rectangle including the well known “golden rectangle” of the “golden ratio.” Undoubtedly, the surveyors were being instructed by the same math as the artists and architects because we see grids of squares being employed by artists to transfer and enlarge designs while maintaining the same proportions.
Today, I use the same system as the Egyptians, and later the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Renaissance artists and architects. Every feature of the painting is plotted to maximize its power to attract and focus the eye on things that matter. Color is added almost as scientifically as the composition. If one starts with a coat of red, the next layer will be green its opposite or blue its complement. Each area goes through a series of alternating cycles until a coat is built up. Then, sand paper. The sand paper slices through the acrylic “plastic” and leaves slivers of different colors from different layers. Sanding also reveals some of the canvas warp and woof. Ultimately, the surface becomes very flat with the shear softness of silk.
It takes time to produce a painting that way, but I am quite sure that they are unique. In fact, quite often the viewer’s comment is, “I’ve never seen any thing quite like this!”
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| 关于此艺术家 |
The Art of Perfection
In a perfect world, we say, there would be peace, love and plenty. We think about it everyday because this world falls so short of what we hope for. We are used to being disappointed by life; that's life, we say. Because of this globally felt short fall, mankind in the twenty-first century has developed the deepest feeling of hurt of any of previous times. War, famine, genocide, political malfeasance, loss of fellow feeling, compassion, overwhelming anxiety and a general dissatisfaction with life are the symptoms of a world most wanting in healing. It just shouldn’t be this way.
It is to this wanting for healing that my works speak. They seek to give a smile or a warm feeling to a broken heart, a fresh breath to a mind in need of rest. Pure colors for the life of drabness, muted tints for the over stimulated soul, fantasy for the young at heart, symbolism for the intellectual, these are the pigments on my palette. This body of work seeks to depict the life we would want in a perfect world, a world that mankind so desperately needs.
My vision of that world has become, I believe, a new style, or one I have never heard defined or named as I have conceived. This new style is perfectionism. Not the obsession, perfectionism, but the art of perfection, the ongoing process of perfecting and the representing of images imagined of a perfect world. Instead of the criterion of reality, it is the concept of what could be. Everything has its place, there are no shadows, no aberrations, nothing left to chance except the way the paint dries. Colors are chosen by their appearance in the cyclic order of the color wheel. Everything means something. And everything one longs for is in a perfect world.
Finally I know what style my art is. Of course it never reaches absolute perfection, it is forever perfecting itself. Its perfection is only relative perfection, not absolute. A definition might be: that which is suitable for the purpose for which it was designed. It’s taken 37 years of painting to put a name on it. But, I've finally realized that there is a distinction between perfectionism the obsession and perfectionism the vision. With perfectionism as style or vision, it doesn’t matter that our art falls short of it, what matters is that we envision it. If we have a vision of it and we produce works of art that reflect that vision, we are engaging in perfectionism the style. If the viewer shares in the vision, perhaps having the vision himself, he thus experiences the healing that comes from hope, the hope in a perfect world. Perfectionism the style is an abstraction just like any other style is an abstraction, the vision behind it is not about representing reality in a certain way, it is about a reality unseen but hoped for, its about what is in the heart. The question is not whether the artwork is perfect or not, but is the artwork ABOUT perfection and does it strive to show what is in the heart.
By contemplating what might be in a perfect world , we feed our hearts on hope, the thing that mankind needs more than anything else in this dark hour. Seeing this and having the means to do so, I intend to do whatever I can to bring some hope into this world through my art.
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Paradise
2005
acrylic
61x86
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Garden of Eden-like vision of the future.
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Truth
2004
acrylic
46x61
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Birds of heaven cirlce between the tree of life and the conscious
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Meditation
2005
acrylic
34x121
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The cycles of the earth are a meditation of life.
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Enlightenment
2004
acrylic
61x86
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The lotus is the symbol of wisdom and enlightenment.
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Travelers
2007
acrylic
34x46
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Vision
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First Snow
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First Spring
2007
acrylic on canvas
24x34
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Landscape
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Waterfall
2007
acrylic on canvas
24x34
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Landscape
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| 教育程度与个人自传 |
Achievements
1959–1965 Artist's Studio, Seattle , Exhibit
1960 Joffrey Ballet, Seattle , Exhibit
1960 Westside, Seattle , Exhibit
1961- 1963 Hallmark / Scholastic National Merit Gold Award
1966 I D Gallery, Seattle , Exhibit
1965 – 1969 University of Washington School of Fine Arts / Undergraduate
Thesis in Dynamic Symmetry under John Paul Jones , Student
1970 –1972 Western Washington University School of Fine Arts /
UndergraduateThesis on Geometry of Ancient Art and
Pacific Northwest Indian Art , BA, Graduate
1972 Fairhaven Gallery, Bellingham , Exhibit
1973 Drawing and Painting with Dynamic Symmetry, Whatcom
Community College, Bellingham , Instructor
1974 N N Gallery, Seattle , Exhibit
1974 - 1995 Consulting Engineering: Drafting, Rendering, Graphics, CAD
Drafting, Drafter and Instructor
1995 - present Full-time studio work: drawing, painting and writing
academics
University of Washington, Seattle, WA (‘65-’69)
Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, BA (’72)
South Seattle Community College, Seattle, WA (’96)
Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA (’97)
Highline Community College Des Moines, WA (’00)
Society of the Golden Ratio, AFD ('04)
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| 未来的展览 |
| 2007 Open Studio Exhibit |
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网站: www.artifaex.com |
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