Michael Cameron

Encountering Cameron's art at first glance you see beautiful works with finely nuanced surfaces and rich layers of paint. Multiple depths of field play figures against shadows and lights and buildings and sheets of droplets the read like a veil through which you see something intriguing happening. Surfaces are built up - then eroded back with turpentine, then built up again with spray paint. But what is going on in them? To understand this, you must understand how Cameron works. He paints, most often, at night. Quieter, less demanding, more contemplative, "Night," he states, "is a far more interesting world."

But the other imagery comes from multiple sources of seemingly unrelated things; ideas he hears on the radio while he works, phrases from books, recalled imagery from the circumstances of his life, moments spent talking with a friend on the street. Often these random things fuse and join on the canvas as a sort of diary, summations of a moment, an event, a thought. But you must futher understand the kind of person Cameron is to really get his work.

He is senstive, thoughtful and intelligent, quiet and respectful. He prefers solitude, listens before he speaks. He is caring, concerned about the world's tough issues such as hunger and poverty, injustice and inhumanity. His debate over these things takes place on the canvas, where he lays out his thinking and a complex scene full of multiple meanings seamlessly blended together in seductive beauty. This thread of beauty is his distintinctive hand. It runs through all his works, and they are as different as the circumstances that each new day brings.

- excerpt from "Michael Cameron", written by Lisa Christensen

Banff, AB based. Nationality is Canadian.