mike king

  1. paint
  2. textiles
  3. collage
  4. on paper
  5. video

about


mikekingart@gmail.com

@mikekingart

Copyright © 2024 by Mike King. All rights reserved. No part of this artwork may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the artist.

6. → journal


Journal Entries,  
2023 Argentina

February 21, 2023


I am currently searching for my color form. I’m interested mostly in color interaction, harmony, and response. When I say response I mean the response my sensibility has to colors natural interaction. I want to work out the problems on the canvas as colors present themselves, and I look at it almost as solving a problem and tweaking and “correcting” to the point that satisfies my aesthethic and emotional choice. 

I’ve been Inspired by the way people like first Josef Albers and then Stanley Whitney nullified all other choices besides color, by only utilizing the square to present an infinite number of color arrangements. 

Obviously I find this idea brilliant, but I desire something a bit more complex than this overtly simple idea right now. When I say I’m searching for my color form, what I mean is this exactly though, and I won’t arrive at this point without A LOT of experimentation. I inherently desire communication through representation, while reaching for the simplest rendering of the idea. 

March 5, 2023

I’ve added a new process inspired by my time so far here in Argentina. The first day I arrived I was immediately struck by this massive gridded constructivist mural I saw on Corrientes avenue. I’ve since been on the hunt for more work by other constructivist painters of Latin America, and most of them are from right here or over in Uruguay which I plan to go see. I’ve found a new love for the grid suddenly, especially when I see Joaquin Torres Garcia’s paintings and the way he utilized the grid and paints almost hieroglyphic like illustrations in each square. 

In the painting I’m working on right now I made a series of miniature collages and photographed them and brought them into photoshop to make a greater image. Once this sketch was complete I gridded out a blank canvas and broke the painting down square by square starting from the top left and moving left to right the way we read and write, or the way a muralist plots out his grid for a big painting. This way of painting has opened up something new for me the way I’m able to focus on every square inch of the painting and give it ultimate consideration. I broke this one painting down into 16 paintings and was able to complete it in one swift action. The thing is I want to consider the grid still, and I want it to come through the painting. I don’t want to hide the grid the way a muralist would behind the paint.. I want the grid to alter the paint, and give variation to the subtleties of color shift from square to square almost like an Ad Reinhardt painting. 


March 17, 2023

A few years ago I had a teacher ask me how I could use so much color and talk about such a tragic topic when making work about specific climate disasters. the question caught me off guard because I had never thought about color like that, the idea that my usage of color could read as not serious or seem too light hearted. I really couldn't come up with an answer for her at the time because it was such a new thought to me. I never felt like I made light hearted artwork and my urge for color would not allow me to abandon it and create more minimal tonal works. it is something that has stuck with me for a long time, questioning my own usage of color and searching for an answer to why I use color the way I do. I grew up in a punk scene whos general aesthetic was always black on black on black, ink on paper, and xeroxed into obscurity the images in zines. all of that media had its effect on me, in my taste, and for a while my entire visual aesthetic. I like the challenge color gives me in this way to create something as piercing and lugubrious as that. 

May 18, 2023

I’m interested in visual immediacy, to me some kind of feeling I get as soon as I look at the image. Everything is there and colors are harmonizing and pushing and pulling us through the space. I don’t like everything to be so illustrated, I want things to read universally. the image could be anywhere, a landscape in the countryside of your hometown, or a symbol of suffocating industry in a far away place. To me the immediacy of the simple landscapes I make place me in a distant nostalgia-like memory of a place. The simplification of all the forms allows my mind to create its own narratives in the spaces and I hope it does so for the viewer as well. I don’t want to take over too much with my own narrative and specify things too much. Whatever illustration I do use, it’s for the utter communication of an idea. 

July 30, 2023

a single tree in my paintings represents relief. A metaphor taken from the flat open fields of Texas, relief from the sun. But I like to use it as a visual relief often as well. A way to relieve a place that feels too vast in the painting. A place that’s asking me for mercy. 

August 11, 2023

the paintings are icon paintings. nostalgia and imagination form the ideas of person places and things as simply as possible and as close to the universal symbol from my own vernacular. 

August 15, 2023

Anni Albers created what she called “pictorial weavings.” She called them this because of their proximity to tapestry. The difference was she wasn’t concerned with the actual techniques of weaving in tapestry. So she came up with the term pictorial weavings, because they didn’t have anything to do with traditional tapestry. This is something I have thought about with the fabric collages. They aren’t quilts because they aren’t sewn together. They also stem from my painting process, so I still consider them paintings. 

August 15, 2023

“ask a child to draw a car and they’ll color it red.” -Enzo Ferrari 

August 17, 2023

I’ve recently been gaining inspiration through a construction project I worked on in Timor Leste, building a school in a rural neighborhood in Dili. Thinking about the retaining wall we built with the Timorese military, who led the way in gathering all of these organic stones from our project site and stacking them in a way that was imperfect and not up to any kind of rigorous regulations that we worked with in the Navy. They were essentially collaging a stone wall next to our uniform cut block wall on the side of the school room we were building. I loved that contrast a lot. Physically they are barriers but both visually can be conceived as grids, but their construction and philosophy are completely different. I like to lean toward that intuitive way of building something in my own paintings. 

August 25, 2023

My current artworks have been made nearly 100% with recycled fabric from my neighborhood upholstery shop. They leave the scraps of fabric in a bin at the front of the store that I pick through and buy the unique ones by the kilo. I like this idea a lot as it’s a step out of the art supply store and it’s way more eco friendly. Originally I was using painted pieces of paper to cut out for my collages I was photographing until I found these fabric scraps. Immediately I started adding the fabric into the collages to gain different pattern and textures to paint from. I started these giant floor collages because I suddenly had much bigger pieces of fabric than I ever had of the paper sheets. After doing a few of these giant floor sketches I realized how intuitive and direct the fabric was and that I should just skip the entire photography step and make the works out of this fabric directly to the canvas.