C Michael Wiswell

Posted on: Aug 27, 2016 at 9:54 AM

Posted on: Aug 27, 2016 at 7:37 AM

“Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name. Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, Not one of them is missing." Isa 40:26

Posted on: Feb 26, 2016 at 11:09 AM

Posted on: Feb 17, 2016 at 11:43 AM

I am born, raised and whole life lived in the Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest, Washington State, USA. I attended school and college here. I grew up trying to make art here. I was doing artwork before the freeway, before the high rises when the Smith Tower was the only high rise. Then many years later, I drew the structural plans to additions to the freeway (I-5) and to a number of Seattle’s high rises built in the eighties. And my roots grow deeper through my progenitors. The Portland AE firm of my grandfather and uncles designed the Aurora Bridge (I-99) and a number of buildings in Seattle, including a funeral home on Queen Anne Hill. Another grandfather, a civil engineer for the City of Seattle, oversaw the Denny Regrade Project and the creation of Harbor Island. The idea that my genetic inheritance might give me the predisposition to be artistic and interested in architecture and engineering seems to be supported by my own historical record.
The pursuit of Art has been a lifelong endeavor. At as early an age as ten years, I had formed a concept of Art that remains with me to this day, that Art is something spiritual in the human heart. By spiritual, I mean aesthetic pleasure, intellectual enlightenment, emotional sensation, and other forms of higher thought processes. By the heart, I mean the core of human consciousness where the essence of the individual resides. It is at this level of consciousness that I strive to create the experience of Art.
The tools I use to accomplish this are geometry, symbolism, and technique or stated another way: composition, content and craft. With ancient Egyptian and Greek dynamic symmetry construct a space divided into perfect proportions. With the whole body of archetypal icons, I tell a story meaningful in content. And with Renaissance methods with a unique twist, I fashion an opening into a perfect world. In a perfect world, we say, there would be peace, love and plenty. We think about it every day because this world falls so short of that for which we hope. We are used to disappointment in life; that is life, we say. Because of this globally felt short fall, humankind by now in the twenty-first century, has developed the deepest feeling of hurt of any of previous times. War, famine, genocide, political malfeasance, loss of fellow feeling and compassion, overwhelming anxiety and a general dissatisfaction with life are the symptoms of a world most wanting in hope. It just should not be this way. It is to this wanting for hope that my works speak. They seek to give a smile or a warm feeling to a broken heart, a fresh breath to a mind in need of rest. Pure colors for the life of drabness, muted tints for the over stimulated soul, fantasy for the youthful, symbolism for the intellectual; these are the pigments on my palette. My body of work seeks to depict things we would wish for or imagine would be in a perfect world, a world where the imagination is free to be a child.
My vision of that world has become one not seen through the eye of a camera, but through the heart having a dream. Everything has its geometrical place, trees grow in rows, birds fly in formations, everything has an intelligent design, and colors appear in the cyclic order of the color spectrum. Everything means something. It is in imitation of the intentioned way of creation, of the original way of the universe. It is the art about perfection, the representing of images imagined of what a perfect world could be. Like a dream, not like this world, but a place where what is hoped for could be. The human spirit needs to dream and fantasize. We never outgrow this need. I have chosen a perfect world to fill this need. The media provides us with more than enough reality of the real world. However, just because we see a fatal car crash doesn’t mean that we should stare at it also through Art. When asked, most people will describe a park-like garden, a paradise as the place they would most like to be. If they have a vision of it and I produce works of art that reflect that vision, I am helping to keep that dream alive, the hope for a perfect world.
I am striving to reflect what is in the heart hoping for something better, hoping for a reality unseen but possible. By contemplating what might be in a perfect world, we feed our hearts on hope, the thing that humankind desperately needs more than anything else in this dark hour. Seeing this need and having the means to do so, I intend to do whatever I can to bring some hope into this world through my art.