Michael Larry Simpson

Artist Statement

Michael Larry Simpson is currently active in the studio in 2024 working on two areas that remain central to his practice. With his Panel series, he continues his decades old exploration of color as subject, pushing the physical boundaries of the work to further explore juxtaposition.  Additionally, Simpson is revisiting his Puzzle Series, exploring the iconic imagery of vintage children’s puzzles as subjects for contemporary art.

Puzzle Redux

Michael Larry Simpson reintroduces us to the iconic images of vintage Sifo and Playskool children’s puzzles from the 1960s and 1970s in his new collection of paintings, Puzzle Redux. These puzzles were ubiquitous in playrooms, classrooms and doctor’s offices for generations of children, and for Simpson they were an introduction to art and illustration that informed a young artistic mind. In this new digital age of screens and videos, the primitive and static nature of these simple images take on a new importance, as if relics from another time that deserve reverence and embellishment.

In this collection, his second series of puzzle paintings, Simpson keeps the subject characters intact, cutting each piece by hand to match the original puzzle’s cut lines, but then reimagines them as more substantial and expressive Pop Art. The commercial and manufactured are replaced with burnished oil pigments and expressive colors that signal a unique artist’s voice. Many of the characters or objects are isolated,lacking detail or context adding a mysterious gravitas to their playfulness.

Panel Series

My process is to make small color paintings on panels and then combine them to create life-sized compositions. I begin by intuitively “coloring” the individual panels to explore my fascination with the aesthetic, emotional and cultural powers of color in its limitless variations of hue, saturation and lightness. I am a physical mark maker and work exclusively on the hard surface of wood, staining, burnishing, dyeing, drawing and layering colors with oil, dye, stain, latex and other media to explore a spectrum of texture and finish.  I then combine multiple panels to create color relationship compositions. As an artist, musician and professional in fine perfumery,  I have a high awareness and interest with how individual “notes” of color, music and scent can blend to create harmony, discord, stillness, movement, familiarity, surprise, easy reflection and provocative contemplation.  I compose my individual panels with these dynamics in mind to move the eye within and around the work.  My aim is to evoke visceral reaction and encourage metaphorical contemplation in dynamic, on-going discourse with the viewer.

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