Michael Larry Simpson

Artist Statement

 

Michael Larry Simpson is currently active in the studio working in three two areas that remain central to his practice. With his Panel series, he continues his decades old exploration of color as subject, pushing the physical boundaries of the work to further explore juxtaposition.  Additionally, Simpson is revisiting his Puzzle Series, initiated in 2018, exploring the iconic imagery of vintage children’s puzzles as subjects for contemporary art.

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Panel Series

Simpson paints and arranges colored panels to calm and/or provoke the viewer  in a visual and emotional game of give and take. For the past two decades, Simpson has played this game with just four colored panels arranged side by side in a life-sized composition. Four colors, twenty-four color combinations, offer an ever-changing relationship between the art and the viewer. The art is always ready to play, it is up to the viewer to step right up and share their mood and their thoughts. Reflection, projection, absorption and provocation are just some of the outcomes Simpson seeks his art to impart during and after the engagement.Simpson is also at play during the creative process. In his first phase, he paints, stains, dye and burnishes wood panels with color one at a time for the sheer pleasure of letting his intuition empty some amalgamation of hues he’s recently garnered or remembered from nature, fashion, art and design. The second phase is when Simpson plays with the many panels he’s created to find the composition of four that best suits his eye, that resonates with his current vision and that truly surprises and challenges him.  The pieces work for Simpson as he sees the colors, the combinations and their relationships as metaphors for the dynamic juxtapositions of attitudes, beliefs, visions and emotions that he experiences in daily life. Those combined in one piece provides him with the interest to engage and interact in either with a quick walk by glance or with a considered ponderance in passive meditation or active discourse.   

 

Puzzle Series

Michael Larry Simpson reintroduces us to the iconic images of vintage Sifo and Playskool children’s puzzles from the 1960s and 1970s in his new collection of paintings, Puzzle Redux. These puzzles were ubiquitous in playrooms, classrooms and doctor’s offices for generations of children, and for Simpson they were an introduction to art and illustration that informed a young artistic mind. In this new digital age of screens and videos, the primitive and static nature of these simple images take on a new importance, as if relics from another time that deserve reverence and embellishment.

 

In this collection, his second series of puzzle paintings, Simpson keeps the subject characters intact, cutting each piece by hand to match the original puzzle’s cut lines, but then reimagines them as more substantial and expressive Pop Art. The commercial and manufactured are replaced with burnished oil pigments and expressive colors that signal a unique artist’s voice. Many of the characters or objects are isolated,lacking detail or context adding a mysterious gravitas to their playfulness. 

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Michael Lawrence Simpson studied Art and Art History at the College of William and Mary and continued his art education in at The Art Students League and School of Visual Arts as he pursued a professional career in international perfumery in New York, Amsterdam and London. Simpson and his wife, Ellen, relocated to Hillsdale NY after raising their family in Ridgewood NJ, and opened a studio/gallery in Hudson NY that shows his work alongside other emerging and mid-career artists from the Hudson Valley. Simpson is also a multi-instrumentalist performing in JJ Cale, Bluegrass and Oldtime Stringbands in the Hudson Valley.