Michael Alan

American Contemporary Art by Michael Alan - The Layers Get to Me

2016

Ink & wash on paper Michael Alan is an American artist born in 1977 who lives & works in New York, USA. As a multidisciplinary artist. His work has been...

Digital print with hand drawing & painting on paper Michael Alan is an American artist born in 1977 who lives & works in New York, USA. As a multidisciplinary artist. His work has b...

"My work principally consists of deeply abstracted figure compositions--intuitive constructions that begin with random marks establishing larger masses of torsos, heads, and limbs in an undefined setting. The emphasis is almost purely on intuition. The figures are born of their surrounding environment, emerging only partially and fugitively from the layers of pigment. A narrative is evident but never overt. A crown, a shield, a boat, a wheel. Though the subject has recently coalesced around my reading of Dante and Shakespeare, the settings remain extremely vague- a beach, an interior, a woodland. The paintings are, in the end, meditations on the relationship between the protagonists in a wordless drama. In my paintings, I use a cold wax medium combined with dry pigments, oil paint, and embedded fragments of burlap. The surfaces eventually build up into a dense, rugged terrain." --Thaddeus Radell

Unsigned Provenance: Estate of the artist Peter Marks (1935 -2010) Peter Marks was born in New York City on January 18, 1935. A lifetime New Yorker, Marks graduated from the Hig...