newjerseynewsroom.com

BY PAT SUMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

N.J. ARTISTS

Early on a hot July day in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, Micheal Madigan leaves for work. Making sure “Sootie” the kitten is safely inside, he closes the back door and walks across the yard to the garage. Once inside, he picks up where he left off yesterday on either of two large paintings hanging on opposite walls.

Madigan has painted professionally since 1980. He has been an artist even longer: all his life.

The last of six children, Madigan was born in the late 50s in Altoona and grew up in western Pennsylvania coal country, where his father was a coal miner and railroader. (His family history in the area started in the late 19th century, when his great grandfather helped bury the dead after the 1889 Johnstown Flood.) The artist earned his BFA and MA in fine arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Though he pretty much stopped teaching five years ago, except for occasional courses in Italy, he had taught widely in this area from the time he and his wife, Elaine, moved to New Jersey in 1987. She’s farm store manager and education coordinator at Terhune Orchard in Lawrence Township, and they have two sons.

After four solo exhibitions last year, with his work shown in venues ranging from Hopewell, N.J. to New York City, this is a year for painting and research, Madigan says. His painting day usually runs from 8-3, although he adds some evenings during winter.

Sometimes he takes off to look at other artists’ work. “It gets me out of the garage,” he jokes, although his pleasure at being in his studio – windowless and devoid of all but current paintings, equipment, some bright lights, his computer and a guitar – seems clear.

His works, which could loosely be described as abstract, are generally acrylic on panel, which “stands up to what I do in making a painting” — and he may incorporate modeling paste, pumice, sand and other materials. A clear varnish layer protects the work before sanding, and spraying water on the paint before it dries creates a bleed effect. He may use craft syringes to apply fine squiggly lines on the surface.

Madigan thinks his “ideas carry more effectively” on large paintings, so his raw birch panels are made to order by size — as large as 5 x 6 feet, and much less often, down to 18 x 24 inches. He seals them with clear and chromatic primers.

They “compose themselves in a process through time,” Madigan says of his pieces. That process includes reviewing photos from a given travel site, recalling why he took the pictures in the first place, then revisiting his memories of the experience. Every time you revisit a memory, it’s changed, he says. “It’s kind of like life: we’re always revisiting and processing it.”

On a prepared panel, the artist creates textured under-layers, later sanding parts to pull some layers through while protecting others. He thinks of his sanding and other subtractive techniques as metaphors for memory loss – a subject he’s keenly aware of because of a loved family member who suffered from Alzheimer’s, with its dissolution of memories and personality.

“You come to recognize how much we are, as human beings, a composite of our memories and experiences,” Madigan says, explaining that his paintings are intended as evocative images, not narratives. “Any of these paintings may be five or six different experiences at one specific site — a composite of my different memories . . . ”

Much as he prefers to leave categorizing his works to viewers, he says, “I think of them as vehicles of memory somehow. Most people may refer to them as abstract, but I just think of them as evocative images.”

So how does the artist know when a painting’s finished and it’s time to move on? Madigan laughs at that question, saying some have taken years to finish. “This piece,” he says, nodding toward one hanging in his dining room, “is probably done. It’s not calling out for changes.”

But the sure signal of a finished painting comes “when it’s in someone else’s hands. Then it’s done.”

For Madigan, “research” has come to mean travel to European sites ranging from neolithic to medieval, soaking up impressions and taking myriad photographs – his “visual notebook” for recording sights and experiences – and collecting the memories that feed into his paintings.