* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Micah Crandell-Bear is an abstract artist from Sacramento, CA. He left home at the age of 17 with the intentions of becoming an artist. His first job in the art world was as an intern for the Michael Himovitz Gallery. Here Micah developed his craft and soon became skilled enough to paint professionally. Micah uses his youthful angst to fuel the vision behind his painting style. The use of his unique hard urban tones, text, spray paint, and graffiti make his style of art comparative to none. As Micah’s career grew, so did his artistic maturity and ambitions. His persistent spirit earned him the ?rst ever abstract show at the 20th Street Art Gallery.
Micah describes the work by saying, “I fuse my love of abstraction with the place I’ve called home my entire life. My paintings are minimalist color fields held together by the spine of the horizon line. This collection is a culmination of my exposure to the California landscape, inspiration from artists such as Motherwell and Rothko, a penchant for minimalism, and perfectionism in my process. I am inspired by the way photographers can use their medium to document the time, light and palette of places they have traveled. The Polaroid/Instamatic/Hipstamatic border combined with my Californian palette creates a sense of the nostalgia inferred by photography. The vintage Polaroid format for my pieces takes me back in time by calling upon the feeling of memories and experiences without bringing to mind a discrete or specific remembrance. The Polaroid inspired border acts as a compositional component that juxtaposes a retro-photographic framework with current abstract painting techniques to form atmospheres of light, color and memory. The exaggerated scale of my paintings transforms the classic, hand-held instamatic image, drawing the viewer into the experience of another place. I have spent the last decade manipulating plaster, painting bands of color stripes, experimenting with paper, and exploring subject matter. These experiments have been critical in my developing as an abstract painter.”
