Biography

 

Michael Hogan (b.1950)

 

I was born in Torrington, a small mill town in northwest Connecticut. I went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts and law school in New York City. I moved every two years, from law job to law job, city to city and back again, saving enough money to take time off and write fiction. I published first novel in 2003. My second novel will be published in August, 2008.

 

At the age of ten, I realized that I could draw as well as anybody in my hometown. A sculptor from Florence, Italy, Paulo Abbate, recognized my talent and encouraged me to make art my vocation. Unfortunately I received no support from family. Art was nice for girls on Friday afternoons, but it wasn’t for young men who would become lawyers, doctors or captains of industry.

 

I didn’t draw or paint much of anything until a few years ago when my fiance, Lisa, the woman who’s now my wife, encouraged me to paint a picture for her mother. After that Lisa bought me some art supplies, and I began to do again what comes most naturally for me – drawing and painting.

 

I love the old masters. Having lived twenty years in Boston and seventeen years in New York City I had access to great museums. The current climate in the big city art world is toxic with grad-school theories and manifestoes and much ado about nothing. Figurative art’s been relegated to the Photoshop. Good draftsmen are considered passé and – worse than that – purveyors of something as old fashioned as beauty. Modernism certainly had its moments, however it’s left many in the post-post-modern world at sea with little confidence in their own judgment about what’s “good” and what’s not.   

 

To face the crisis head on I’ve opted for doing the old masters in a new way, attempting to combine the best from the past with the fragility and shattered aesthetic of the present.

I want people to enjoy these paintings – to look at them and know they are good and beautiful and excellent without having to be told that they’re good, beautiful and excellent. With the return of talent and expertise, the tyranny of the critical-few will dissolve and return to the public what was theirs to begin with – the right to say “yes” or “no.” The right to say: “This has value and this does not.”