The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — Painter Michael Close has been in the art world for 30 years. He’s seen movements come and go, he’s tried surrealism, modernism, the elusive post-modernism, abstract this and realist that.

For the most part, though, Close is not interested in art movements, and he could care less about styles of painting that only a handful of people can appreciate or understand.

“The nonobjective abstraction seems to lose the meaning to me,” Close said. “I think other artists appreciate nonobjective abstraction, and I do (appreciate it). But my feeling is that I want to communicate.”

He allows that the response to pure abstract might be a more intellectual one, one that is based solely on the paint and how it’s put on a surface. But that allowance does not make him want to paint that way.

Instead of working in complete unknown — focusing on form and color to elicit an aesthetic response, as some abstract artists do — Close has spent years working with layered faces and figures.

“When you deal with a figure, one of the intentions I have is to communicate to the audience, and I found that I could not communicate the way I wanted to by using things the average person could not understand,” he said.

Close said he wants to convey basic, universal ideas in his work — a goal he accomplishes partially by grounding himself and partially by letting himself go. He uses faces because there are thousands of nuances to blend and blur, hundreds of variations on color and shape.

“I deal with the basic elements that I believe reflect the universal truth, and I don’t see doing art for another artist or group of artists,” Close said. “I really want to do something that’s my own but really communicate with the audience certain ideas like freedom.”

Close’s faces have expanded into more complete figures and taken on traces of realism — developments he said were bound to happen, considering the duration of the project and Close’s career doing technical drawing and drafting for film and TV. But the ideas stay the same.

“If someone says to me, ‘Your work makes me feel free,’ to me that’s the highest complement you can give,” he said. “People can say it’s beautiful or something, but for me, freedom is the most important thing.”