Michael Abrams is an artist and painter of nature who has exhibited his works around the United States and abroad. He grew up in Rensselaer County in a home perched above the majestic greenery of the Hudson Valley. These views became deeply engrained in his subconscious and profoundly influenced the way he sees the world.
Combining a love of art history and images collected from memory and nature, Abrams work offers a glance at personal observations summoning far off scenes, diffused tree forms, and glints of light reflecting off distant waters, all suggesting a selection of familiar fragments of nature meant to recall memory and emotion and instill longing for an idyllic world.
One of the strongest influences on Abrams practice has been the painters of the Romantic Period in Europe and then in America with the Hudson River School. These artists exemplified this era’s concept of the sublime in nature and art, robustly, and with an element of theater, extolled the virtues of nature as man’s spiritual cathedral. Their ability to capture the breadth and scale of the natural world exemplified an Arcadian ideal.
Since his move to Vermont in 2008 from lower Manhattan, Abrams has embraced the local natural environment as an increasingly direct influence on his work. Daily observations in the Green Mountains have altered his perception and appreciation of our environment, it’s fragility and our place in it. Humbled by the abundantly varied vistas and their never-ending seasonal rebirth, the striking physical character of the landscape, the unique qualities of light, and atmosphere oscillating between crystal clear to thickly obscuring, these elements have become key in the story he is telling of his relationship with nature.
The paintings are rendered with a layering of oil glazes mixed with color from semi- transparent to opaque creating an atmospheric and luminous quality.
He has lived and worked in lower Manhattan for thirty plus years and now enjoys life in his studio in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont.
