Wednesday, 22 October 2014

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig Martin is a well-known Irish painter and sculptor. He was born on the 28th August 1941. He studied Fine Art at Yale University School of art and architecture. He currently lives in London. Michael`s work is mainly based on ordinary or everyday objects. This includes objects like; laptops, chairs, tables and etc. He stopped painting in the 60s. He started to do drawings on wall. Then in the 90s he started painting walls and it then “became obvious that painting rooms was like turning the room itself into a painting. There was a strong sense of creating a pictorial space out of the 3D space.” He then wondered if he could “make paintings that were similar to what I had achieved in the room” and so moved to painting. Michael has now been painting for the last 10-15 years. His work is like a collage of different object at different scales. What I mean by this is, for example; a chair and a pin are different sizes. One is small land the other is not. He enlarges the pin to make it a different scale or he may choose to shrink the chair. He said that he thinks of his “paintings as flat sculptures.” Some of the materials he uses includes paint, tape and computer. He uses the tape to get the clean and crisp edge and uses 4 inch rollers to paint with. He has “almost eliminated the brush”. He uses rollers because it gives an even coverage and since it takes many layers of paint it is better to use a roller. There are approximately five to six coats of paint for every colour used and there are normally 20-30 colours used in one painting. Once the painting is done he would then remove the tape to show the colour under (black) and getting a clean outline. The reason why he layers the colour is to get a brighter and richer colour. But to begin with he would pain the whole canvas the colour he would want the outline to be so that when he removes the tape that colour is shown. He believes that “as soon as you make a piece of art, you're an artist,”

Even though Michael Craig Martins work is very simple (has to shad or tone and is just in block colours) I still think that his work is good. The reason for this is that it is unique, no one has painted everyday object. I also think that his work is good because you need to be accurate even with tape so that the object doesn't look disproportionate.
Here is a few paintings of his:


Here are the URL`s for the information I have on Michael Craig Martin esearch page:

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