1222 West Kirkwood
Bloomington, IN 47404
www.michaellierly.com
501.993.5588
As a young boy I was an adventurer and rogue frog hunter. I captured, traded for, or purchased hundreds of frogs, snakes, salamanders, and turtles. I amassed so many aquariums and terrariums for my slimy little friends that I opened a zoo in my parents’ garage and charged 25 cents a head from other neighborhood kids. I spent countless hours in the epic forests behind my parents’ house trying to capture nature in the most literal possible way.
During this same time I drew hundreds of comic books. The first several featured the doings of anthropomorphosized frogs. These frogs were detailed but hardly realistic. I was immersed in frogs without wanting to represent them as they were. I wanted to represent frogness; my own greatest dreams and fears dressed in their froggy finery.
This is all eerily similar to how I live and work now. Now I mostly read or more often listen to books and lectures about nature rather then engaging it directly. Now I paint figural paintings rather than frogeral comic books. But the impetus is the same. I want to learn as much as possible about the world outside of me only to extrapolate from it to create painted worlds to represent the world inside of me.
My paintings are indirect products of my ever-changing intellectual obsessions. They are about self-revelation. They are not directly referenced from nature but amalgams of my memories, reconstructions of past experiences, and dreams, as well as adaptations from art history. Screaming babies and disjointed color blobs, nude figures acting out primal origin myths, and other out of time depictions are my own fictions about human struggle. They are attempts to reconcile the ways that we suffer like other animals and the ways we undergo the hyper self-awareness unique to our species. I spend countless hours in efforts to create a total experience in paint: a whole story now emerging from the fragmented memories of those years in the wilderness.
