| Mike Carroll lives and works in Provincetown, MA where he is a painter, curator and frequent contributor/ collaborator to arts related organizations and events in the area. Mr. Carroll writes and speaks on art and exhibition spaces. I usually make images with oil paint and sometimes ink, pen, pencil and collage elements on wood panels that have been finished with hand made gesso. The last series were departures from observations of the sky but during their execution became something quite different. The panels are small "holdable" things that come with the requests that held things make. Look closely, take your time, be responsible for the possibilities outside the frame, etc. You have to look at them alone, in a couple or with a small group which enacts some familiar but overlooked intimacies, some of which depend on the absence of currencies generated by marketing. Also the sense of being a stranger in a crowd - a contemporary kind of intimacy. I am not setting about to make paintings - the science of that is too overwhelming, though I love and am fascinated with the demands that (art) objects make of me in order to get made. I am more interested in the questions images ask than in any answers they might provide. I am fascinated with how ideas are constructed and with their execution, with how when painters make certain decisions their work becomes universal. This requires that I practice how order is made, lost, and restored while the work demands that I subscribe to the studio's sense of time, schedule and irony. I like to think that carefully attending to each piece over long periods of time assures it's eventual essential strength. My work portrays new situations that defy definition while remaining willing to accommodate their formal assignments. I don't want a narrative or story in the picture, but would rather have that occur during when I am making the piece, so it should be present but not story. Who you have to become to make something decent is valuable, so I hope the painting keeps me honest. I think they are like maps, but here the geography is mind and because of being influenced by the Cape they are often rooted in a landscape mentality, so sometimes I call them "mindscapes". What I want is to occupy an architectural space visually with marks, lines, etc. where time, texture, and material value are indicated by the dynamic that occurs when the image gets made and looked at. Most colors are familiar and recognizably close to the tube but different enough to make a reality slightly amplified for our examination. Time in these pieces mostly appears to be stopped, like frozen on a beat, or passing through a moment. The images are influenced by American painters like Arthur Dove and Ross Moffatt, the abstract spaces of Twombly, the patterns of Philip Taaffe, the topography of Fred Tomaselli, the hierarchy of Persian drypoint watercolors and the ritual of ancient Mandalas. I find motivation in my body - it's scale when confronted by the big sky, it's fascination with the holographic space of the Beech forests here, and the frequent anxiety in my stomach. Marks and gestures are made then rubbed or sanded away - maybe fully or maybe partially to reveal their structure and potent demands for whatever is next. Though they are constructed with much hesitation and doubt the resulting pieces are simple and sure of what they need to be. -MC Contact: Mike Carroll 508.487.7455 Mikecarroll2302@earthlink.net
When I got it I thought it was like a techno-angel portrait, a cypher for release and flight, adventure and movement, a little bit fearful, a little bit threatening--on the edge of euphoria and contemplation, soft and gentle, floaty. Then Sept. 11th and it became mutely terrifying, stark, a euology of aftershock and tacit violence, disappearance, with the black hole of the jet engine sucking all the blue sky into it. I was upset, protective of my previous pleasure in its high lightness and airiness--"these events are poisoning my sweet painting!" Still feel a little shiver when I look. The black hole in the middle (actually slightly off to the side). My pre-existing fear of flying which has gotten so much worse. Bad planes: big improbable metal droning bad-air contraptions that steal my subtle bodies (Gar Elliot says it takes 9 days for your subtle bodies to catch up with you after a plane-flight). But feeling too the untouched gracefulness of that painting, the soft edges and upper-air silence in it. The way an emblem of fear and displeasure can become/is also an emblem of gracefulness and joy. Odd.
- Frances Richard
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