No More Dragons – 78″ x 180″ (triptych) – Completed in the studio – 2019
After a 45-year career as an artist in the US, I have made my home in a small village in the mountains of Northern Thailand for the past five years.
Though I indulge in other interests—such as the science of the cosmos, the body, and the mind—and, of course, making my contribution to keep a few local bars in business, I manage to fit in a few sessions every week in my backyard open-air studio, nestled among papaya, mango, banana trees, and a few fruit trees whose names you may not recognize.
I didn’t fully realize it until I made my way to this paradise, but my primary place for personal salvation is painting. Without it, I get too deep into my head and feel “off.” With it, everything else in my life is better. It’s my connection to myself and the world around me.
Every day, I marvel at how lucky I am to be alive and able to contemplate and study this consciousness. It all works so much better for me than the religious life I was born into. I have truly found a measure of peace here that somehow eluded me in the US.
Life ain’t so bad.
Recent Works
Thailand Collection
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Las Vegas Collection
Artist's Statement: Michael Wardle - December 1991
For fifteen years, as a figure painter, I toned my canvases with a turpentine wash. I enjoyed watching the shapes that the brush strokes seemed to create as the pigment, suspended in the turpentine, would dance across the surface of the canvas. Often I would follow the shapes with more opaque applications of pigment to see where they went. But at some point I would always remind myself that I was a figure painter, mop out the design and patterns that were emerging, and proceed to paint what I had set out to paint.
Finally, late one night in March of 1989, something happened and I allowed myself to let go and follow the urges that had haunted me every time I started a painting. At about 3:00 A.M., I sat in my studio in front of two paintings, “Watch Me Run” and “Monkeys”.
After 15 years of a somewhat rewarding yet frustrating career as a painter, I was home. When painting a representational canvas I am telling the painting what to be. When painting the abstract canvasses, the painting tells me what it is. Each stroke solicits the next, the flow is intuitive, yet deliberate. The process yields a surface that may look unordered and foreign at first, but as one spends time with it, familiarity and a structured sensibility reach out of the canvas and pull the viewer into a new world that has always been there.
I love painting these canvases. They are me, and I am them.