Michael Darby

I am a graduate of UWM’s Peck School with a BFA in Printmaking, ’92. After a 29 year detour that disconnected me from creating art on a regular basis, a good friend in 2023 finally got me back on track. And I’ve been so grateful since that day! My current focus is essentially a visual journal of my daily experience in and around Milwaukee. Part of that detour was becoming a cabinetmaker. During which time I grew to deeply appreciate trees and all they provide to us. I have loved trees and grown to appreciate the broader natural world ever since. However, being a lifelong resident in the city and loving the closeness of people and richness of community, I’m also drawn to the beauty (and ugly) within us as people and the spaces we create that provide us shelter as in our homes or larger public spaces to gather as a community. I work primarily with pen and ink but also with Pitt pens (for color). The drawings are begun in live, on location with pen (no pencil), and completed later in our home studio. Using the initial live “sketch” as the foundation that the finished is built from. I strive to maintain the energy of that moment of recording life while completing the work off-site. I’m pretty certain this idea was born out of an intensive summer workshop I took from Leslie Vansen “Experimental Painting and Drawing” during my senior year. What Leslie taught during that course made a lasting impact for me! Recently I’ve been thinking about recreating some of my pieces at a larger scale. I’m interested in seeing how the marks I’m using to represent and assemble images at the intimate scale of a sketchbook will translate if scaled up say 10x. Allowing the lines and marks to become more abstracted because of their increased scale and how we might perceive them differently.