An Original Visual Language: Art by Michael Kilgore
Michael Kilgore is a mixed media artist who works in paint, pastel, collage, and other materials. In his practice, Michael builds stylized images that draw on the aesthetics of 20th century art movements such as Cubism and Expressionism, blending these styles with a modern take on traditional African art to create an original visual language.
Woman in purple platform shoes
I really enjoy Michael’s figurative works in mixed media. In galleries such as his MODERN ART and FASHION series, the artist creates two-dimensional images that focus on a central figure, fracturing the features of the subject into simple shapes and overlapping planes of bright colour, creating a cohesive, abstracted whole that emphasizes key characteristics and evokes the work of Picasso, De Kooning and others.
It’s interesting to see how this fractured approach translates into the artist’s collage works, as well. Using a wide range of mixed media, Michael creates abstract images around fragments of human figures cut from magazines and photographs. The eye is drawn immediately to these recognizable human elements, and the artist creates a kind of path between these resting points through mixed media abstraction.
