Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Zachary.
Michael, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I definitely didn’t set out to be an artist, I was just trying to avoid a boring life. The idea of a 9-5 job didn’t appeal to me at all and I was horrified at the idea of sitting at a desk all day. So, like a lot of young people, I tried all kinds of things hoping something would stick. Luckily, I took a drawing class and it clicked right away for me. The combination of physical work and intellectual gamesmanship really appealed to me. I fell in love with it immediately and I still feel the same way 20 years later.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I consider my work realist even though it doesn’t imitate reality as much as it runs parallel to it. I am not interested in objectivity, but, I am interested in constructing complex, organic pictures that feel both familiar and strange. To do that, well, you really have to look really closely and objectively at things but also at the same time, you also need to be super sensitive to how they feel to you.
Drawing is full of contradictions and paradoxes like that. You are inventing an artificial system and then using it to trick people into believing they are seeing something real. You have to struggle to be as controlled and disciplined as possible or the drawing falls short but you also discover things that are spontaneous and unexpected in the process or it fails just as surely. If I have any kind of a style or point of view in my drawings, it is probably that I embrace those paradoxes head on. I want you to see me wrestling with them because ultimately, it’s the incomplete poetry of an unresolved struggle that makes us feel most present and alive.
I have a one-word definition of success: progression. That’s really all there is to it. As long as I’m experiencing new things and getting a little bit better at seeing with each drawing, I feel like I’m doing my job.
Patience and endurance are the most important thing in this business. Drawing never came easy for me, I had to work really hard to improve. I used to feel bad about it but with hindsight, now I realize, it’s like that for everybody. When you see one of my drawings, what you are really seeing is my 20 years of steady, relentless practice manifesting. I’d tell any young artist starting out to stick it out and push themselves. It’s worth it. Not because of any external measure of success but because of what you will learn about yourself.
Have things improved for artists? What should cities do to empower artists?
At the risk of sounding blunt, things are harder now than they were when I was starting out, and it is largely a rent issue. It is now twice as expensive to rent in Boston as it was when I moved here. That pushes artists, and especially the youngest and most vulnerable artists with the most challenging ideas, farther and farther out of the city’s creative nucleus. It’s a bad situation and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I’m pretty active on Instagram (@drawsoftly), so that is probably the easiest and best way to see what I’m working on in real time. You can also always find me on my website (www.drawsoftly.com) or through Room 68 in Provincetown (www.room68online.com) where I show. But, by far the best way to support an artist is to see their work in person. That’s why we make it and just showing up to see it is the best compliment you could possibly give any of us.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.drawsoftly.com
- Email: drawsoftly@gmail.com
- Instagram: @drawsoftly
- Twitter: @drawsoftly
Image Credit:
Michael Zachary
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