ABOUT Michael Flisak

I made my first oil painting as an 8-year-old and still remember mixing the reds for the boy’s hair and the blues for the shirt as well as the skin tones. Colour was essential to me even then.

I grew up doing figurative drawing and took to drawing from the model and studying anatomy in my first year of art school. Art school also introduced me to abstract painting and the freedom that comes with this approach.

My first abstract paintings began with a loose gestural style that allowed me to explore the nature of paint. I did everything from breaking it down to a thin drippy wash to applying it thickly with a palette knife moving quickly to a non-figurative form of abstract expressionism. Switching to acrylics, I started making large abstract works with flat colours, exploring symmetry and asymmetry.

After art school my work evolved into a more formalist style, moving into shaped canvases. This led me to consider sculpture for the first time.

My first sculptural maquette was a kinetic abstract sculpture where hanging asymmetric forms pivoted eccentrically in the breeze around a fixed form. I was intrigued by the shapes made by the changing negative spaces between the objects.

Experiencing these elements (colour, the figure, formalism and abstraction) as different camps was at first difficult to reconcile. By taking numerous approaches, cycling and recycling ideas, exploring different idioms of painting and sculpture, I have found common ground in my understanding of making art.