Artist’s Statement

Michael Maas

These paintings, primarily acrylic on panel or canvas, are from an on-going series which I began in July 1997.

Although the forms are imaginary, the illusions of depth, light and surface, along with the allusions to botany and biology, give people a strong sense that the paintings portray something very “real”.

The powerful emotional response expressed by viewers ranges from maternal to religious to sexual, and seems to cut across most of the usual boundaries of age, culture or education.

My goal with these “relationship” paintings is to create images which do suggest a feeling, but are “open-ended” enough to allow each viewer to experience these feelings in his or her own personal, and sometimes unexpected, way. 

In an art-historical context, my work might be said to be an innovative combination of several established schools. From the “hard-edge abstract / op art”, such as Karl Benjamin or Victor Vasarely, comes clean, crisp, accurate emphasis on color relationships and geometry in an intellectually sensory way, combined with (rather than opposed to) the emotional, even visceral reaction we have to much of the work by the “abstract expressionists” such as Jackson Pollock or Lee Krasner. Also, there is generally a suggestion of the organic or biomorphic and sensual (or even sexual) abstraction of realism-based painters as Georgia O’Keefe.