KARIN SANDERS
FINE ART
MICHAEL SOUTER
Michael Souter is a painter, photographer and graphic designer who works and resides in New York City. He is best known for NARCISSIST, his one-man show, exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art in 2005 – a unique series of “Daggers”, “Wraps” and “Mirrors” in which he uses unconventional pairings of acrylic, typographical elements, photographic images, reflective surfaces and etched text, to reveal - with the emotive intensity of one who has first-hand experience - the anger, pain and humiliation of a narcissistic relationship.
Throughout much of his work, Michael has applied the technique of layering colors: He builds up his surface and then deconstructs and "reapplies" consecutive layers of paint, thus denying the painting's uniform flatness. Michael works by reacting to the fluidity and immediacy of the paint, controlling and giving up control, and exploring the tension that results. He eschews the traditional painter's tools in favor of using non-conventional and found objects to create texture and patterns. Evolving through an elaborate process of felt experience and intuition, his non-objective works often take on a life, and a history, of their own.
Today, he continues to experiment with mixed media and layering as in his latest series on paper, entitled CUT. In CUT, the photographic imagery and paint bleed into one another, only to be stripped away, revealing luminous layers that come into focus like a developing photograph. The dynamic blocking and fragmentation of the floral images hint at the transitional and transitory nature of life, while the interplay of
over-riding images imbue the flowers with an almost mystical quality as they are captured somewhere between the full vigor of life and the finality of death.
Michael Souter was born in 1953 in Detroit Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Painting from Western Michigan University. He has also held faculty appointments as an instructor at the Ecole Internationale in Geneva and California College of Arts and Crafts. His work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Geneva. He currently lives and works in New York City.
Throughout his painting career, Michael has relocated frequently, with each successive move resulting in another layer of influences. In San Francisco, he explored the use of bold shapes and of introducing
texture. In Tokyo, he took up the idea of using large-scale pieces and the suppression of color, which involved layering black and white paint on top of intensely-colored hues.
