Michael Bise’s Newest Drawings in “Michael Bise: Afterlife” at Moody Gallery
Michael Bise continues his artistic practice of improvising images spun from biographical details. His newest exhibition of drawings “Michael Bise: Afterlife” is at Moody Gallery through May 7, 2022.
When it comes to biographical narrative, this artist has given us some doozies, like the series with eye-popping depictions of his own heart transplant, and the portrayals of his fundamentalist religious upbringing. The latter included a drawing of young Bise being “prayed over” by six Pentacostal-style church elders. The look of confusion and discomfort on the kid’s face, I wrote in a 2009 article, “consolidates awkwardness.”
Bise’s graphite drawings hold two levels of meaning. I easily recall a drawing of a kiddie bedroom decorated with a mega-size crucifix and an avalanche of Disney iconography that chronicled piety as well as the oppressiveness of gazillion dollar marketing and branding, and an illustration of the bible-toting mother discovering the kid sexually acting-out with his stuffed Mickey Mouse that dexterously penetrated childhood sexual awakening among devout folks.
Moody Gallery elaborated on the dual narrative in the newest works. “Bise’s newest series of drawings continue to maintain a commitment to autobiographical narrative. More than ever, he draws out from these personal narratives broader symbolic and archetypal meanings.” The gallery further said Bise harnesses “traditional drawing processes with ideas from ancient, medieval and modernist canons of painting” and “integrates multiple traditions within a style that remains attached to the distant past while engaging with modernist and postmodernist tendencies in image making.” Look closely at the new drawing “Mother Reading to Her Son” to see precisely what this art jabber means. Bise draws on a childhood event, but instead of rendering a straightforward portrait of his mother, he borrowed a Renaissance era Madonna’s face from one of Raphael’s paintings, used a cartoony style for the kid’s face, and constructed the drawing with distorted space and abstracted forms.
Bise discussed pilfering the Raphael Madonna’s face during the artist talk he gave at the gallery on March 26. During that talk he briefly described a process he uses to initiate his extraordinary drawings. It begins with a photograph. From the photo, he creates a small preliminary ink drawing, then projects it, and guided by the projected image, renders on a larger scale. The graphite markings start out loose and less controlled, erasing helps to define the image, into which he adds intricate details. Bise called his process “repeatable.”
“Michael Bise: Afterlife” is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at Moody Gallery.