Statement 

The visual is incredibly physical for me. It’s weight, presence, and rhythms, all intermingle and combine as factual events to be considered and felt. Where distance and proximity is an embodiment of pressure and gravity, where form is presented as mass, and color is viewed as passages of physical experiences, the synchronized layering of all these visual pillars power much of my efforts. 

The embrace of oddity and its' openness to questioning has a visual richness that speaks to me as well. Animated, stumbling, unstable, weights shift, often generating unbalanced movements where every component wrestles with the everyday in a formal visual language that’s seems fitting for these often strange and dire times. 

Overly bright and saturated, these paintings also drink in the  thick opaque implosive color that easily shoots backwards into the wall as much as it explodes off the wall. Here all positive and negative relationships are meant to change places in every glance. Color in my mind is physically dimensional and brutally deceptive. I’m particularly drawn to interplays of color that rhythmically glitch, pause, or reverse course. And as thickly layered flat edges meet and take on an almost embossed tailored like presence, the bright reversing saturated grids of the tints around them shift shift in and out of view as they themselves jump and stutter in place. A visual obstacle course almost where color and form can cohabitate, dance, and change places all on their own while still competing for you attention. In the end a place that is also an object, one that projects mystery, playfulness, and a sense of purpose. 

My Ink Forms grow out of the same emphasis on sensation as my paintings. Layered, twisting lines of ink isolate specks of the paper underneath to create an optically charged surface where depth and detail oscillate. A resonant but unspecific form is introduced and then reversed from portal to object, and back again. By releasing the ink and shape from the surface and context of the paper, presence and perception interchange.

Bio 

Mike Stack is a painter whose work explores color as a physical entity, where visual elements of weight, presence, and rhythm combine as palpable experiences. After spending many years painting from life, Stack increasingly focused on color variation itself, eventually distilling his practice to examine color’s spatial and gravitational qualities.

He holds an MFA in Painting from Purchase College, SUNY, a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a four-year certificate from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Stack has exhibited in Arizona, Philadelphia, and New York, and has been a professor of art at Pima Community College in Tucson since 2002, where he has lived for seventeen years, drawn by the distinctive desert light.

CV