The Artist, Michael Price

Born in Stoke‑on‑Trent, England in 1951, Michael Price studied at the London Central School of Art, now Central St. Martins and lived in Munich for over two decades before relocating to New York in 1999 and becoming a U.S. citizen in 2010.

Figurative Art Exploring Unimaginable Dimensions
The figurative paintings by Michael Price explore the mythological and psychological archetypes which reflect the countless facets of the human condition, both the beautiful, the inhumane and sometimes the humorous. The writings of C. G. Jung and Paul Tillich were central to this development. Jung’s works — especially “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche”, “Civilization in Transition”, and “Psychology and Alchemy” — revealed to him both the vastness of the human psyche and the boundless scope of our imagination.

Alchemical Metamorphosis No. 5, Saint Ines Battles the Dragon of Climate Change, gold leaf, mineral pigments, linen, lapis lazuli, azurite, cinnabar, resin oil paint. — Alchemical Metamorphosis No. 5, Saint Ines Battles the Dragon of Climate Change. 100 x 223 cm - 39.4 x 87.8 ins.

A selection from exhibitions

“Clothing the Contemporary Nude in Renaissance Color”

Jonathan Goodman (who has written for Art in America, Sculpture and Art Critical) wrote in 2009, “The proper adjective for Price’s synthesis of opposing colors and forms might well be ‘Dantean,’ so intense are the colors that communicate the composition’s strong feeling. Price returns to the figure on a regular basis, using the nude not only for his historical studies, but as a way of bringing forward representational form in a timeless fashion.”

Homage to Dürer, Michael Price, figurative artist, New York artist, natural mineral pigments, natural color, colour, lapis lazuli, azurite, malachite, cinnabar, realgar, natural dyes, archetypal nude, archetype, Renaissance, palette — The deep blue of large particle azurite

The late James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia University in New York wrote that Michael Price has restored and preserved for Western culture our Renaissance tradition, that depended on artists and their assistants grinding the semiprecious stones and mixing them with a variety of binding mediums according to propriety recipes. Time – and, from my vantage point as an art historian, industrialization – caused the Western culture to irretrievably lose the methods of making natural pigments.

Michael Price has single-handedly mitigated that historic loss.