Michael Pukac

Painting is a very mercurial thing. Its a relatively simple act that has maintained relevancy throughout time and across most, if not all, cultures. For me, painting is like a collision of concepts as much as it is a combination of skill and material. It is where the creatively abstract and intellectually complex concepts of translation, illusion,... allusion, and transformation find a nexus. I crossbreed different genres, eras, and conventions of painting into phantasmagorical anti-epics. I see my work as a kind of cultural aesthetic gumbo poured into its own reality, which is dedicated to honor the creative process. As multifaceted as painting is, it can be reduced to two parts: the what and the how. Firstly, what I paint, are goddess-like, saint-like women in situations or moments that seem to come from some bizarre myth or a story that you wish youve heard. I pull from a barrage of romantic and painterly eras of art that reflect our own: Baroque, Rococo, Ashcan, and Art Nouveau. I am influenced heavily by other creative mediums including film (all sorts of animation, 50's, 60'sclassics, and documentaries on culture), theater (Shakespearian, Musical, Avant Guard), music (blues, classical, hip hop, jazz, folk, and rock n roll) and literature (Twain, Hemingway, and Robbins. ) They all seem to add to the collision in one way or another. I love to make playful paintings - heartfelt yet irrational. They are like romantic absurdities or well-spoken riddles with no answer - anti-narratives. For instance, the popular riddle by Lewis Carroll, Why is a raven like a writing desk?. Its a beautiful sentence and its a riddle you really want to see solved, but the answer is obviously never forthcoming. In a way, thats the sort of image or scenario that I would like to create. Its a balance between mystery and accessibility. My paintings may be seen as fun, funny, or pretty on the exterior, but this is just a tool to lure my audience into a world of mixed and matched myths and culture, literary gags, homages to great works ...Read More