PANEL PAINTINGS
"Michael Larry Simpson paints and arranges colored panels to engage the viewer in a visual and emotional game of give and take". For the past two decades, Simpson has played this game with just four colored panels arranged side by side in a life-sized composition. Four colors, twenty-four color combinations, offer an ever-changing relationship between the art and the viewer. The art is always ready to play, it is up to the viewer to step right up and share their mood and their thoughts. Reflection, projection, absorption and provocation are just some of the outcomes Simpson seeks his art to impart during and after the engagement.
WOODEN PUZZLE PAINTINGS
"Michael Larry Simpson reintroduces us to the iconic images of vintage Sifo and Playschool children’s puzzles from the 1960s and 1970s in his on-going series 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. “As a child, the bold colors, thick wood pieces, and characters in these wooden puzzles hooked me. When I rediscovered them as an adult and artist I was captivated again–and saw endless possibilities to evolve them–and personify them with my emotional experience of childhood–the idyllic as well as the traumatic and chaotic.”
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."
