About the Artist
"For the sensitive soul, sometimes confronting an anthology can be like grabbing a tiger by the tail. This takes the bravest of adventurers, but if you are determined to hold on you will usually be in for one of the most memorable, enlightening, and exciting rides of your life."
Artist Michael Malan
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Artist Michael with lovely wife Ruth
Far edge of Michael's workbench
Michael is primarily an impressionistic painter. Preferring premium quality acrylic media and painting materials, his work is expected to continue to increase in value for art investors. Michael's Site444.com inventory of available paintings remains relatively limited; most will continue to appear listed on this website.
Michael is passionate about helping art lovers gain a better appreciation for impressionistic arts as well as various other forms of beautiful and emotionally inspiring artwork. He actively endorses the following art supporting organizations and galleries:
The Getty Institute for the Arts [among its many charitable projects, this non-profit provides qualified artists with opportunity to create artwork while sitting before famous artworks on location]; the American Watercolor Society; and the American Art Therapy Association [a non-profit which rehabilitates and enhances the abilities of people afflicted with developmental, physical, and mental disabilities through a variety of professionally supervised art projects]. The Thomas Kearns and McCarthey Gallery, and Fatali Gallery [both galleries located in Park City, Utah].
The following provides a view into Michael's passionate life as an artist who has always enjoyed painting and studying art in many places throughout much of the world.
Michael’s formal art training was enhanced by some outstanding artists and scholastic art teachers during his schooling years. Fortunate to receive schooling in his favorite interests, he also pursued mechanical drawing and immersed himself in architectural home design. Michael had an insatiable appetite for all things architectural, finally drawing the blueprints and even subcontracting a custom home for his own immediate family in Utah, USA. Mostly a self-taught artist, Michael has created exceptional works in pencil, watercolor, oils, and acrylic media.
With a lifelong passion for travel, Michael has made cultural visits to many countries where he has personally studied prominent artworks. He has lived or visited in locations in various towns and cities in Canada, Mexico, many U.S. States, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Italy, Monaco, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, China, India, Thailand, Philippines, and Japan. He lived a few years in Denmark and in Hawaii. In all of these locations he has continually sought to familiarize himself with the outstanding arts and architecture that define various cultures, their present inhabitants, and their history.
Michael's current art works mostly emphasize colorful impressionistic painting. His paintings are widely varied, but often include floral art in nature settings and European city street and landscape scenes.
Michael's advice to older artists:
"Don't let grandchildren hold your
other wet brushes while you paint!"
"As far back as I can remember I have had a compelling passion to seek out and enjoy art, not only by painting and sketching, but in many other of its spiritually enlightening forms," Michael explains. "I do not like 'dark art' (so called art involving graves, ghouls, skeletons, and horror inducing depictions of blood, monsters, witches, and other scary dark images). Fundamentally, the art I love is harmonious and includes drawing and artistic painting using a wide variety of graphic media. It also includes sculpture, photography, dance, drama, enlightening music, poetry, creative and technical writing, literature, and architecture (including interior and exterior design in homes, buildings, parks, bridges, etc.).
Occasionally I find myself identifying with and focusing on beautiful aspects of a certain form of art from time to time. For example, I have enjoyed studying in depth about the physical and psychological affects that various colors have on people, animals, and plants, and how color affects their personalities, moods, and emotions. I am fascinated about how shapes, colors, and positioning in paintings affect a viewer’s space and depth perception as well as his or her feelings and moods relative to the artwork. I often try to purposely incorporate certain emotional effects in my paintings, rather than to merely hope to discover a certain feeling or emotion emanating from the artwork after it has been completed.
What is beauty? Perhaps beauty has its own time, place, and season in all areas of harmonious art. If the adage is true that art is in the eye (or hearing, or touch, or spirit) of the beholder, then it seems that some of the best art should be the most moving, most loved, most appreciated, most endearing, and most desired art to own as well.
My painting objective is that at least one of my pieces of art strikes and excites an artistic chord of beauty or of extraordinary passion in you as an art observer. If that happens, whether it be temporary and soon fleeting, or deeply moving and lasting, still—as strange and impossible as it may seem to some—I am convinced that the powerful reality of such an emotionally amazing and time shattering event shall somehow miraculously resonate with my own spirit as the art creator.
Yes, I hold to this uncommon postulate, even as ridiculous as many may think it is, that all things in time and space pertaining to our world are spiritually connected and influenced in some degree by one another. If your viewing of one of my artworks is extraordinarily moving and positive, is it possible that I might be rewarded in some mysterious positive way as well? I think so. And should that happen … thank you!"