Meet Michael MacDonald | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michael MacDonald and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael, do you disagree with some advice that is more or less universally accepted?
In the past, people have told me “See what’s missing in the art market and fill that spot” and I have never agreed with that. I feel that you can’t keep up with culture. By the time you have understood where your work fits in a moment in time, the moment has passed. I personally would rather fail doing what is authentic to me than to succeed by imitating something else. It for sure helps to adapt how you get your work to people, but adapting your work to what you think they think it should be, never pans out. Sometimes I think about how in the early 2000’s people didn’t know they wanted an ipod before they were given an ipod. A new version of the discman still came out around the same time, but the discman was inevitably always compared to a previous version. Though not everyone was going to like the ipod, it was unique and people had to sit and form their own opinion on it, good or bad. I feel that a first hand genuine bad opinion of my work is better than a third hand disingenuous good opinion of my work. the more your work can just be itself the closer you get to having people find it and decide for themselves that they love it, and those people tend to stick around for a long time.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My paintings tend to depict minute scenes that hint at a larger, more surreal narrative. Hyper-rendered volume and shadows, flattened textures, vibrant colors, and faceless features are things I focus on, to lend an uncanny and sinister undertone to what could otherwise be comic scenes. I have found that the paintings I have produced over the last few years create more questions than they do answers, focusing instead on creating a specific emotional tenor in lieu of providing a succinct and straightforward anecdotal tale.

What sets my work apart from others would be that I really want people to feel a sense of agency in the work and to that I focus less on topics and more on feelings. I enjoy being able to pull people in with simple, clearly defined objects, characters and settings, and then make them take a step back once the frame of focus reveals a scene a little less clear and a little more unsettling. I think I try to stay away from overt topics the same way that I try hard to make things feel vaguely universal.

I am proud of the risks that I have taken, whether they were real or imagined. What felt like the biggest risks sometimes just turned out to be hang ups or mental hurdles. Though a lot of the work I make is purposefully void of defining characteristics when it comes to objects, people and places, I do still feel I huge sense of ownership over these spaces that I have created and filled. Even though I want others to look at my work and feel comfortable finding a space for themselves inside of it, I do find that the line between sharing my work but not feeling as though I am losing it has not only been challenging but has previously kept me from growing my career. Things that were real risks like going fully into being an artist didn’t phase me. Being a full time artist was a huge financial risk but it didn’t feel like one because it was what I wanted to do regardless of outcome.

My best friend Hannah was responsible for helping me start my career. She was at my apartment back in 2020 and I showed her all this work I had been making for years in secret. My living room looked like a brief case overstuffed with hundreds of drawings, paintings and screen prints. Hannah asked me if I had shown any of this work in any galleries and I told her that she was the only person that had ever seen any of my work before. Her response to all this was in two parts: 1. “What you are doing is bordering on psychotic!” 2. “Start showing these to people today! what is the worst that can happen?”. I took her advice and started sending my work to people soon after. Just a few years later and I am now showing and selling my art in galleries and museums around the world.

Was becoming a professional artist easy? Making art seemed to be the one thing that sustained my attention when I was younger. As I found myself getting lost in not just paintings but also advertisements and cartoons, I also found myself spending more time searching for the perfect version of whatever I wanted to see at that moment. I think that is why I decided it would be more efficient to be proactive and just make those versions of images that I wanted to see myself. What started as maybe a self-soothing technique ended up being my artistic practice. So in a way this has been sort of easy because I am doing the exact same thing I would have been doing if i never had any success.

The biggest lesson that I have learned is that time goes by really fast. Projects that felt career defining lost their emotional charge only weeks after the fact. There will always be more time for creating, displaying and selling work and over time the different opportunities that present themselves tend to blend together a bit. Opportunities to spend time with people on the other hand are unique and fleeting. Spending time with family, friends, peers or even strangers are more enriching and have longer lasting effects than most other things in life.

If I wanted someone to know one thing about me it might be that I take my work very seriously but myself not so much. To be honest humor might be the biggest thing that effects my work. I generally feel that if I cannot see humor in my work regardless of how dark it may be, I don’t really want to spend too much time with it. I need to be able to take something absurd seriously and have enough work ethic to treat that absurdity with diligence and focus.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
There are amazing things to see and do in this city every day of the week all year round. I think the following would depict how I would take a friend out and about during the fall which is my favorite time of the year. If a friend was staying with me we would probably start the average day walking my dog in domino park, then taking the train over to the drawing center to see whatever exhibition they had up (they are always good). I like going to some of the newer galleries when they have openings, and 5-50 in Queens is my current favorite. After that we would go to Cozy Royale for happy hour, which has the best burger and martinis that will not drain your bank account. On my walk home I usually stop at Fortunato Bros. Bakery, where I get an iced espresso and a sfogliatella. Every season is different but I would say this is the standard cadence of a good day in my city.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I would like to shout out my friend Tim Kim for what he does but more importantly who he is. I have known Tim for 10+ years and in that time he has always pushed himself to make thoughtful and considerate work. Whether his art has been 2d, 3d, digital it somehow always has a way of spreading effortless good vibes. I would say his daily flowers project that he has done is the epitome of who he is. Every day for the past year and a half he has made drawings of flowers and sent them out on this daily newsletter. The drawings on their face are fun, loose and filled with human emotion. The fact that I currently have 521 of these drawing sitting in my inbox has a cumulative effect on the feelings they hold, while also creating a sense of consistency and stability that is hard to find on a computer screen. I think this work very accurately depicts who Tim is. He is consistently there, positive and always a good version of himself that alway seems to enhance over time. It’s definitely worth taking a look at his stuff on instagram @heytimkim.

Website: https://www.drawingmichael.com/

Instagram: @foopboy