Spero's, acrylic on canvas, 24x36 inches
-Michael, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.
When I was a teenager, my father gave me his 35mm camera. I started wandering around Long Beach, CA, where I grew up, taking pictures of stuff that caught my eye. At that time I was fascinated by Victorian architecture, of which there are few examples in Long Beach, most of them in the scruffier parts of town. My next door neighbor was a professional photographer, and would occasionally have “slide nights” with his fellow photographers. He invited me to show my photos, which, though amateurish, were well-received. This was the early 1970s, when photorealism was gaining notice. I spent a lot of time looking at a big coffee table book on photorealist artists, which inspired me to attempt to paint some of my slide images in that style. I had no academic art training—I studied creative writing in—but I hung out with art majors in college, so I may have picked up something by osmosis. I managed to do about five pieces, and sold one of them, before I got distracted my other things.
I spent the 1980s doing pen and ink drawings of Victorian architecture, for a mail order business that went bust as the decade ended. In the 1990s I took up painting again, primarily to recreate the one painting I had sold, and regretted selling. I was painting in the den, so I chose acrylic so as to not stink up the house. I was still wandering around taking pictures of stuff, going ever further afield, to Montana and Michigan to visit relatives, to Mexico and Europe, with slightly better cameras. I went through the typical progression of entering community art shows, showing work at the county fair, and eventually getting a show at a co-op gallery in Los Angeles, which led to a connection with an established gallery in Pasadena. In 2012 I submitted work to the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, and was accepted for their 2013 show. I’ve done that show every year since then. It runs for two months, July and August, with about 120 artists showing work in a variety of media. It’s sort of a summer camp for artists, and I cherish the interaction we have. And interacting with attendees is always interesting—their take on my art is often unexpected, and a reminder we all see things a bit differently.
Now that I have retired from my day job (more or less), I am able to spend more time painting, and having a steady retirement income means I can concentrate on painting what I want, without worrying whether it will find a buyer or not. My only constraint is where to store stuff.
Hibiscus, acrylic on canvas, 14x18 inches
-You spend a lot of time painting ordinary places that most people walk right past. What’s the moment when a location goes from background scenery to something you want to paint?
That’s an interesting question. Often, there’s an “aha” moment, where I see something and immediately think it will make a good painting. That’s why I usually have a camera at the ready when I travel. But sometimes there’s a change in perception, and something I’ve seen for years or decades suddenly presents itself as a worthy subject. The painting, “Hibiscus” is of a house down the street from where I live, that I have passed hundreds of times in the last three decades, but it was only a few years ago when I realized there was a painting there.
Sometimes that moment occurs long after I’ve taken a photograph. Many times I have found paintable subjects by going through my image archive. For instance, “Leelanau Outbuilding” is based on a photo I took while driving around northern Michigan. The light was wrong, or so I thought at the time, but I took the photo anyway, figuring I could return when the light was better. But I never did, and eventually forgot the exact location. During Covid, when I was stuck at home, I decided to paint the image anyway, and that bad lighting actually made the image work for me. It’s important to have a lot of images to draw from, but looking at them with an open mind is important as well.
Melody Liquor, acrylic on canvas, 24x36 inches
-What changes for you when you turn a photograph into a painting? Is there something that you notice or discover by taking the time to paint that you would perhaps miss if it were simply taking a photo?
I had a show once called “This Is Not a Photograph”. What I meant by that is that the image becomes something other than a mechanical capture when it is transformed into a painting. By closely observing the source image, I have to make a myriad of decisions to render it on the canvas. So the painting has a mind behind it, a soul. The source of the image is immaterial, really. It could be a photo, could be a setup in a studio, could be a plein air scene where the light is constantly shifting. The artist’s process is the same, making thousands of little decisions as to how to render the scene. What I like about painting from photographs is there are always little discoveries to be made, little mysteries to solve. What is that shape in the background? Why is there a purple tint in that shadow? When we look at a scene in real life we see it as a whole. But the painting process means one has to consider everything, piece by piece. All the background, all the foreground, all the stuff that our brain ignores so we can function in the actual world. But as a painter I get to dwell on everything; I get to see the universe in a grain of sand, to quote William Blake.
I often discover in painting a scene that it is something different than what I first perceive when taking the photo. I noticed, when painting “In the Land of the Free” that the debris spread around the yard in front of the house was not all old abandoned junk. Much of the stuff was new-looking, and as in the case of the motorcycle, pristine. So what caused it to be spread in the yard was not entirely slovenliness. There may be other factors at work. I had no desire when taking the photograph to dig deeper (people in this area are well-armed), but in the studio I have the leisure to contemplate what the true narrative might be.
Valley Grand, acrylic on canvas, 26x40 inches
-Your work is a great example of a cohesive series. A solid collection with a theme, yet each piece stands strong on its own. Does working in series change the way an idea evolves from piece to piece?
One series I’m working on is my “Home is Where the House Is” series. This began with a single house in Bozeman, Montana, near where I lived as a child. It was a modest little house, from the middle of the last century. I didn’t quite realize what drew me to it at the time, but eventually I realized it was similar to houses I had grown up in, so was perhaps a way of recapturing my past. As I add houses to the series, they are mostly modest affairs, mostly middle-class homes erected in the 1940s and 1950s when prosperity reigned. They confer dignity on the lives lived within them: a bit of comfort, a bit of security, a bit of refuge. Some are older, some a bit newer (though by the 1970s American houses stopped looking interesting, at least for me). I found when I exhibited these that they resonate strongly with people. Those of my generation remember growing up in them, of course. For younger people, they’re where the grandparents lived, which can also be places of comfort and refuge. I’ve had people tell me they know exactly where a certain house is, and even though they’re off by a few states, I know in a sense they are right, so I don’t argue with them.
Another sort of series I’m working on I call “Walkabout”. It consists of urban scenes I’ve encountered in my travels. I began collecting the source images for this series back in the mid 1970s, when I would wander around southern California with a friend. We liked to take a particular street and travel it from end to end, something that is easily done in SoCal, as it is mostly laid out on a rectangular grid. We discovered that there were always unusual sights to see, if you travelled far enough, and paid enough attention. I’ve continued to add images to the series, and to paint them on occasion. Latest in the series is “Valley Grand”, which depicts a collection of shops in a building from the 1920s, which I photographed sometime in the 1970s. I had it in my head that this shot was from Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena, taken before the downtown was redeveloped and all the interesting antique shops and used clothing stores were replaced with corporate chain stores. As I was painting the scene, I thought I’d look up the exact location on Google, and discovered it was actually in Alhambra, a few cities away. I don’t remember shooting in Alhambra, but I must have.
Hard Living in Paradise, acrylic on canvas, 24x36 inches
-What's the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
The best way is to check out my website, tmichaelward.weebly.com, and my Instagram, @tmichaelward. For those interested in seeing physical pieces, I have a number of works on display at Ethos Arts in Newport Beach, CA. www.ethosartsinc.com. And, I will be showing my work at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts again this summer. The festival runs from the beginning of July to the end of August, and I will be at my booth most days.
Statement
My subject matter is derived from photographs I have taken over the past 40 years. Subjects include places in Southern California, where I have lived since the age of 12, and places I have visited in my travels, from Montana to Mexico and Europe.
I have come to see my paintings as documents of things looked at but not seen, the ordinary environment that we live in but seldom examine closely. I believe that by close observation, which is necessary to translate source photographs to canvas, I can begin to uncover the grace that is hidden in the things around us. The paintings are my way of bearing witness, and of making people stop what they’re doing and pay attention to something they may have never seen before, but that makes them feel “I know this.” A young woman who saw my work on display remarked, “You make ordinary things look beautiful.” Yes, that is what I am after, the beauty in ordinary things that reveals itself if we only see.
I am a self-taught artist. I live and work in Costa Mesa, CA.
Us, acrylic on canvas, 30x24 inches
Bio
George's One 17, acrylic on canvas, 30x48 inches
When self-taught artist Michael Ward was a teenager, his father gave him a 35mm camera, and Ward began wandering around taking pictures of stuff he found interesting. Professional photographer friends thought the images had artistic merit, encouraging Ward to further pursue his art. In the late 1970s, inspired by the then-new Photorealist style of painting, Ward tried making paintings of some of his photos using gouache and illustration board.
Those early works, while successful (Ward even made a sale), were put on hold while other life events intervened. In the mid-1990s Ward began painting again, this time in acrylic on canvas. His impetus was to recreate the early painting that he had sold, and always regretted doing so. Ward has been painting steadily ever since.
Ward entered his art in local art shows, and the county fair, amassing a pile of ribbons and occasional prizes. In the mid 2000s, he joined the Los Angeles Art Association, which gave him his first solo show in 2008. That led to Ward getting gallery representation in Pasadena. In 2013 Ward applied to the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, and was accepted as an exhibitor. He has exhibited in the Festival every year since. In 2024 he was accepted into the California Art Club.
Ward continues to build his online presence as well, chiefly through his website and Instagram, while also exhibiting at Ethos Art in Newport Beach, CA. Having retired from his day job as graphic designer, he now paints full time.