Gorgeous Gorges
“Gorgeous Gorges creates visual symbols that articulate the gentle and reciprocal relationship that is possible between humanity and the rest of nature. Michener sees his work as practical metaphors for a new way of feeling and living with the world, to suggest a reverence for all life, yet not religious.”
— Christine Lawrance
-
- Fly Fishing Mid-May — 68" x 92"
-
- Joy of Spring — 64" x 50"
-
- Still Water, Angler and Swallows — 30" x 45"
“His dwarfed distances, relaxed realism, and his superb use of line, color, and composition work in harmony to create the ‘spiritual places’ of elemental majesty.”
— Paula Gustafson, Asian Art News
-
- Fly Fishing — 30" x 51"
-
- Fishing At First Light — 40" x 76"
Like my farm series, these paintings began with recollections from my boyhood years in Minnesota. Just as the farms evolved to become Surrey, Langley and Vancouver Island farms, the canyon paintings have taken on their own life and little resemble the limestone cliffs and woodlands of the Root River valley in southeastern Minnesota. The gorges have become a metaphor, a close up vision of wild nature. The lone angler symbolizes a vanishing personal and private experience with wilderness.
-
- Spring, Wind, Cliffs, Crows And Angler —68" x 76"
-
- Two Fishers — 50" x 64"
-
- Fisherman in the Canyon — 68" x 76"
The viewer is drawn into an interactive relationship with the motif. Realism too is abandoned. It too often represents a crude materialism in which nature is regarded as “stuff” – an object without spirit. I am interested in nature as living process. I want the inner quality or feeling of my motif rather than its materiality.
-
- Sun and Shade — 40" x 50"
-
- Forest Pool, Angler, Crows and Fisher — 45" x 60"
-
- Fishing for Bass — 40" x 48"
“The Gorgeous Gorges are interactive experiences that encourage viewers to enter Michener’s spatial logic, to view the landscape both aerially and from the diminished advantage of the human figure or marker he has placed as a small-scale reference to the enormity of his illusionary strategy.”
— Paula Gustafson, Asian Art News
-
- Fishing the Gorge — 69" x 50"
-
- Hot and Cold Canyon with Angler — 64" x 50"
-
- Sunday Angler — 30" x 24"
-
- Angling for Steelhead After New Snow — 50" x 36"
“Michener has taken the nostalgic features of his childhood in Minnesota and fused them, quite surprisingly, with the delicacy of colour and detail of Chinese landscape paintings. The effect is subtle but extraordinary—East meets West in what amounts to visual hymns of humanity and the natural landscape.”
— Alex Browne, Peace Arch News
-
- A Quiet Place — 50" x 40"
-
- Autumn Angler — 60" x 36"
-
- Peach and Plum Canyon with Angler — 60" x 40"
-
- Three Falls with Osprey, Crow and Angler — 60" x 36"
“The landscapes are, in the end, inventions of Michener’s imagination, they are made to represent both the difficulty of accessing nature and the healing, supportive environment that it offers.”
— Liane Davison, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Surrey Art Gallery
-
- Autumn Angler — 35" x 43"
-
- Trout Fishing Early May — 36" x 60"
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
—Henry David Thoreau