Michael Cutlip: Playland November 10, 2012

Exhibit November 1 - November 29, 2012; Artist reception Sat, Nov 10, 6-8pm

Seager Gray Gallery will present Playland, an exhibition of new paintings by Bay Area artist, Michael Cutlip. The exhibition will run from November 1 through November 30, 2012. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, November 10 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a full color catalog with essay by Susan Hillhouse Leask, curator of Art and Collections, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

Excerpt from catalog essay:

"Michael Cutlip makes artwork that adds a new and innovative voice to the art world chorus. Vestigial notes of Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Street Art, and Neo-Expressionism play underneath the purity of his joyful and media-rich sound.

Cutlip is a Cubist at heart with a simultaneous vision that invites investigation and inspires experimentation. He erases the lines between painting, drawing and collage, and he does not look up to see if anyone notices that he has no idea where he will place his next mark or with what he will make that mark. As he works, he decides which materials are available and appropriate. He does not feel obligated to stick to a singular subject within the same artwork. Instead, layer upon layer, he recounts multiple narratives through the ancient form of stacked perspective.

As a twenty-first century Surrealist of sorts, Cutlip plays a solo version of the Exquisite Corpse game, thus keeping his process immediate and unknown, even to himself, during the progression of creating. Sometimes a pool of paint suggests an image; other times he scrapes away paint to enhance surface beauty. Apparently random and appropriated animal imagery appears on a slightly abstracted, highly patterned field of color. Kitchen-wall yellow, tomato red, bathroom-tile pink, and the turquoise blue of old radios and ranges evoke the seemingly innocent 1950s in the not-so-naive 2012 and trigger memories that, for many young viewers, especially the artist, are completely new and conceptually imagined."

Official Website: http://seagergray.com/Exhibit_Detail.cfm?ShowsID=61