I’ve always found it interesting to imagine the way things looked long ago. I’m fascinated by the idea that the Appalachian Mountains were first formed around 480 million years ago, and subsequent periods of erosion and tectonic plate collisions gave us the mountains that we are familiar with today. As an artist, I try to create work that reflects these geological processes by using images from the past and allowing the oil painting process itself to mimic the natural forces that have shaped the world by slowly building up layers of paint, and then allowing drips to obfuscate and distort parts of the images, I became interested in spray paint and pop art images, while working in a bicycle repair shop in Seattle, Washington, I developed a fondness for images that were often juxtaposed with run down sections of town, or otherwise industrial areas, and it seems that the artists who made these images were often making pieces that were more interesting than the ones I would find in galleries and museums, and I became interested in finding out why that was, I thought maybe it had to do with the nature of spray painting, one is not necessarily constrained by a studio, the rules of “fine art “, rather one has to work quickly, in the outdoors working with images that can convey a message across cultural and political lines.

My hope is that these paintings can offer the viewer a chance to think about the fragmentary moments that pass us by with little notice, and yet become important to us with the passage of time, as each
painting references the past and offers a meditation on our place in the world. I don’t seek to hide the
painting process, which allows the images to be recognized as self-conscious attempts to create an
experience which references history, geology, mythology, and the nature of artistic expression.

Michael Doig

February 2025