Michael Anderson

My painting process is an investigation into how the action of painting can be distorted, hidden, exaggerated, negated or otherwise modified by the paint or surface it interacts with, how gestural traces may move after their application, and how this alters my intent and the way I navigate the formal elements of painting.

I use many different oil and water based paints in addition to polyurethanes to make mixtures of varying reactivity, thicknesses, opacity and viscosity. I’m interested in how these mixtures readily interact and self-level when wet and how they lose these qualities as they begin to dry.

This method is a protraction of traditional action painting and its idea of painting as performance: doing an action then waiting for the materials to interact before doing another. I use solid surfaces and find that their differences in absorbency, flexibility and texture can significantly affect the outcome when using the same processes. This has led me to experiment with many wood and metal products throughout my practice. Sometimes I add objects like wood offcuts, foil, metal sheets and fabric to ply and aluminium sheets as a means to construct a surface and as an underlying composition to work with and against the moving paint. Often my paintings will have an acrylic border that acts as a containment area for the thinner oil paint and polyurethane poured over the rest of the surface.