Michael Dickter

Vocabulary

2021

My interest is in creating a permanent record of the impermanence of our world. In considering the exquisiteness of a moment shared, of a new connection, a new thought, an old memory, I am often stuck by the duality of permanence and impermanence all around us. My work engages the natural world through this lens. Images of birds or flowers talk to me of connection, of beauty, of freedom, and of the precarious and profoundly precious nature of our world. Making marks on a surface, choosing colors, dripping, obscuring and replacing images talk to this through the act of painting. Artist Michael Dickter on "The Beauty of One" Artist Michael Dickter describes how birds serve as metaphors for nature's fragility and grace in his painting "The Beauty of One" featured in the Woodson Art Museum's 2017 "Birds in Art" exhibition Paintings are made of hundreds of distinct moments and of small decisions; each has its own "no" or a small ecstatic "yes." The finished piece is a history of those fleeting, but profound moments. -Michael Dickter