EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS

Michael Price -- www.michaelprice.info

The Immortal Spirit of Nature

"The intimate relationship between our physical and spiritual health and the physical condition of our environment has become an incontestable fact. The New York artist Michael Price presents this “essential ground of being” in his figurative paintings which focus on the most elevated of all nature’s creations, the nude. In addition to his “nudes of the spirit”, the artist occasionally extends his vision of archetypal beauty into landscape. Drawing in general and drawing from the life model plays a central role in the artist’s working process. The model is asked to move spontaneously without any instruction from the artist. Each drawing session thus becomes the equivalent of a minimalist theatre of the imagination to explore that model’s kinaesthetic awareness. The drawings of the model’s arrested movement are quickly executed using bamboo pens, bistre or Chinese ink and wash on paper. The drawings of either the model or a sketch of a landscape essentially inform the paintings.

The works on panel are all painted with natural colour. In his lectures, the artist presents his twenty years of research into the colours of the Renaissance. Michael Price produces the majority of his pigments from rocks and crystals. The colours include the exquisite blues of lapis lazuli and azurite, the reds of cinnabar and red jasper, the greens of malachite, green jasper and vivianite, and the yellows and oranges of orpiment and realgar. Even colours unknown to the modern era such as the metallic greys and blacks of stibnite and pyrolusite - known to have been used by Perugino and Raphael - have now been revived by Michael Price. Over the past two years, pure gold leaf has become central to the artist’s palette."

-- Michael Price