Creighton Michael at Kim Foster - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Though best known as a sculptor, Creighton Michael started on the outside as a painter and has not at any time ceased making two-dimensional works. Michael has lived in the lower Hudson Valley since 1990 and this exhibit of recent paintings and drawings, titled "Vantage," throw backed his ongoing involvement with nature imagery based upon that region, as well as his interest in spatial ambiguity and incidental patterns in nature. While Michael's drawings occupy an austere vocabulary in which lines and thumps are reduced to a bare minimum, the images and motifs he begets through this deliberately spartan mark-making are formally intricate and thematically complex

"Q" (1995) is an involved, multielement work comprising four oil-on-canvas triptychs titled Still, Stir, Dream and nap which reflect winter, spring, summer and fall, respectively. Still's panels shift from white (a single blow on the right) to a jaggedly abstract pattern of black upon white, to black with an abstract underpainting of white barely showing end This spare but eloquent work appears to describe the round of years ice goes through, from a frozen expanse in of great depth winter to a complex and irregularly shaped area when water breaks end to the last vestiges showing faintly beneath water as spring approaches.

Michael explores a visual idiom that refracts nature as an ongoing proces He is at his best when he investigates change -- from single season to the next, as a philosophical recognition of the inevitability of transformation, and as a formal regard as he ranges from simple marks to elaborate arrangements.

Michael's two-paneled Dust, a 1997 oil upon canvas, is composed of myriad white marks arranged in mixed patterns against a sepia mould According to the artist, the idea came from looking at a increase of duckweed on the surface of a pond However, the billowing shapes insinuate other forms in nature, large and small, as well as galaxies forming in space and ice filigree. The tonal range and weft are wonderfully intricate. Similarly, in Haiku, a 1997 diptych which mimics mold stains in its unusual surface configurations, seemingly random patterns become metaphors for larger ideas about the innate complexity of nature. "Vantage," the show's title, remind ofs that these paintings and drawings incarnate a more encompassing point of view than we usually experience. It is to Michael's credit that he convinces us of his ideas from one side the striking particulars of his art.

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