Michael Becker

Your artist statement mentions that you hear flowers “mumbling” and try to reproduce the time you spend with them—can you tell us more about how this idea came to you?

I think there’s something really beautiful about the idea that the world speaks to us through things like flowers, and that paying attention to everyday moments can open up a sense of wonder. I love to take long walks and I try to step outside of myself when I’m surrounded by the ordinary and appreciate the details of the world. I feel a connection with the world when I open myself to presence. Sometimes I hear the flowers mumbling and I know in that moment we’re sharing something real.

How do your poetic sensibilities influence your visual art—and vice versa?

My work is figurative and unfolds in series, statements that reflect an experience of being with. I make flowers that feel like poems: visual expressions of attention, wonder, and time. I’m not trying to capture an individual flower so much as to make portraits of the time I’ve spent with them, and of the presence they’ve shared with me, and the brief connection we held together. Painting flowers gives me a way to look at the world more carefully, with reverance and curiosity. Through art I can say: I was here, it was beautiful, and it passed.

Michael Becker | Les cynorhodons savant quelques chose

Your technique combines cut blocks, oil, and ink—what led you to this particular process, and how has it evolved over time?

Reduction relief painting is a kind of reflective restatement of thought, like a sketch with a sharpie done over and over. Layered colors obscure and suggest form and presence and impermanence, everything always shifting and fading and becoming. It’s a dialogue between the matrix as it grinds to outlines and the painting that’s becoming. The process invites approximation and iteration, each painting in a series belonging to the others like echoes of a shared moment. And I’ve learned that flowers blossom on the canvas for me most beautifully when I work within thoughtful limits, and I imagine the flower as it discloses itself in reduction.

Many of your works feature a rich texture and vibrant outlines. What role does texture play in your storytelling?

Texture reveals chance and chance plays a central role in my work. There’s a fluidity of what could be in my technique and form reveals itself. Chance saturates encounter with the world, that I stumble at all on a flower that’s mumbling, much less any in particular. This engagement may be textural: repetitive and attentive and animated by affection, it produces in my art a recognition of something, a ghost of what’s passed. My paintings are small odes to the transience of things and mark a past that meets the present. This is explicit in my digital work.

Michael Becker | En avant et par les circonstances

How does your environment in Minnesota shape your practice and your relationship with flowers?

Minnesota is my home and there are many lovely flowers here and it’s mostly where I find myself and take my walks, and it’s only ever where I am in any given moment that I may find wonder in the everyday. There’s a similar meditative quality between making art and taking a walk that lends to each a stillness, and space for contemplation. I take a walk to find communion with the world through something, and my mind wanders, and I make art to utter a reflective stance against the world, a description of experience.

Do you see your work more as documentation of natural encounters, or as a form of personal mythology?

My work is a poetic discourse between me in a moment and the moment’s finitude, marking time. The expression of a copula, the suggestion that in reference to a thing there is or was another thing, weighs some expression of identity. And this discourse opens a field of conceptual possibility that voices a practice of belonging. Experience with the world in quiet reflection stands me outside of myself, and in company with the world. But my paintings ultimately only speak an inarticulate thing. They are blurry mirrors of experience.

Michael Becker | Magic kingdom pansy garden

What do you hope viewers feel or realize when they engage with your floral portraits?

I hope to convey a sense of calm in my work, and to invite a deeper want for the immediacy of presence, and I want for my art to consider a reflective stance that acknowledges the fundamental instability of a depicting object. My paintings are dependent on experience with the world and of the everyday and they reflect a practice and attitude towards layered colors making forms and welcoming presence. And they’re also simply pretty pictures on the wall and presenting a form to what was, like cut flowers in a vase.