There are some things which don't change' | Michael Alexander Campbell Timestamp
Video from Timestamp
There are some things which don't change' | Michael Alexander Campbell Timestamp
"Michael Alexander Campbell is a British-Swiss painter based in New York whose work moves between figuration and abstraction, pulling from historical imagery, literature, mythology, cartoons, old magazines, personal memory, and photographic references. Born in the United Kingdom and raised in Switzerland, he studied Fine Art at Lancaster University before coming to New York and eventually working as a studio assistant to Julian Schnabel.
Michael has been making things for as long as he can remember, but his relationship with art has not always been linear. At one point, he deliberately stopped painting, writing, and playing music under the belief that concentrating his creativity into a single direction would make it more powerful. Instead, he discovered the opposite. “The more you do, the more you kind of become inspired by things which are distantly related but somehow connect.”
Painting eventually became a way for him to stay connected to something more fundamental. “It feels like it is a way to remember who you are in a way.” That connection stretches back to a childhood in a small Swiss village, where drawing, carpentry, textiles, and making were embedded into his education and where historical images became part of his visual memory.
His current paintings often begin with existing images. Old issues of Punch, nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrations, political cartoons, historical figures, photographs, and reconstructed scenes become starting points rather than images to simply reproduce. Michael may simplify them, distort them, model elements in clay, photograph them again, or reduce them until what remains is the underlying structure of the image. His website similarly describes a practice built around distorting photographic sources until their essential composition remains.
What interests Michael is less the individual character than the narrative structure beneath it. “People change, countries change, the names of things change. But essentially there are some things which don’t change. And I think that I try to paint that.” from the video introduction
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