New paintings by Michael Spence

With this show of new paintings, I am moving to new and strange country.  I have not been a painter of people.  My work in the past has centered on the landscape: highly abstracted, fixated on color, shape and composition and these new paintings respect those same concerns. I am working with a similar palate of bold colors and loose, improvisational brushwork.  

The Inventing People title is appropriate because most of these people are made up, conjured often from bits and pieces of memory, imagination, or photos from various sources including the internet, magazines and family photos.  Regardless of the source, they all speak to me in some emotional way, often nostalgic, and always mysterious in a way that I hope leads to more questions than answers for the viewer.