Michael Cameron's paintings depict moments where light quality, expression and gesture are distilled to communicate, translate and provoke discussion on the part of the viewer. Through painting, Cameron creates an atmospheric environment utilizing colour and subject matter that outwardly appears nostalgic, suggesting perhaps an optimistic post war late 1940's - early 1950's.Yet simultaneously, impartial characters peer back at the viewer, snapping the observer back into a sharp focus. Cameron elicits a comprehensive view that equally reflects a world of surveillance, paranoid political movements, and global uncertainty that is as relevant during the cold war and McCarthyism days as it is today in a world that regularly considers terrorism and climate change economic collapse.
Michael Cameron's provocative images hover between abstraction and representation, spiked by acidic colour palettes and an energy trapped in motion. Cameron offers disruptions to the surface of his paintings, which serve to remind the viewer that they are not merely looking at windows into the mind of the artist, but the physicality of painting itself.
Throughout Cameron's painting career the dog has been a reoccurring symbolic figure. Through roles of companionship, guardian and working, man and dog have historically shared a symbiotic relationship. Through out art and literature, dogs have served to symbolically evaluate and offer comment on the human condition adding comment from the personal to the political, and from the domestic sphere to the destructive realm of war and turmoil. Cameron not only builds upon this historical context of dog as symbol but also utilizes the Dog as an accessible entry point between viewer and the painted subject matter. Cameron's dogs encounter the viewer through their direct gaze. They invite us to peer closer into Cameron's composed environments. And his dogs permit us to reflect upon the world around us.
A 1984 graduate from the Ontario College of Art, Michael Cameron currently resides and paints in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. His work can be found in collections across Canada, The United States and England.
