Culture? introducing Mike Creighton...

MIKE CREIGHTON

..On this great saturday-morning culture? is introducing the very talented Mike Creighton. Mike`s work is very organic and "strechy" in a way that makes it become a bit surreal. Culture? is a huge fan, and Mike is telling us a little about himself and his work for us today, so; enjoy...

..Here it is, your culture?- art with Mike Creighton:

..NaNoDrawMo..

..NaNoDrawMo..

..Selfportrait sketch..

..Selfportrait sketch..

..Struggling..

Can you tell the readers a little bit about yourself, name, what country you live in, age etc?My name is Mike Creighton, and I'm a 31-year-old artist and computer programmer living and working in Portland, Oregon, United States. I just moved up here from San Francisco in the middle of 2010.

What inspired you to start being creative?I feel like I've been creative all my life, beginning with drawing at age 4. I remember starting with obsessively drawing Transformers and Voltron. I've got an itch that prevents me from sitting still for too long, or sticking with a single medium. I don't know exactly where it comes from, but I'm compelled to simply make stuff.

Is making art your fulltime job, and if not, what else do you do?It's not my full time job. I don't make any money from it. I earn my living as a "creative technologist". I do a lot of interactive development, where I bring designs to life, making them respond to human input. I figure out how to make things work using any and all available technologies. And this bleeds into the digital art that I make – which is largely interactive or realtime – and leans toward abstractions of form, color, and rhythm.

Have you gone to art school, if yes where did you go and what did you study?I earned a BFA in Computer Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). I focused on interactive design, but I briefly double-majored in traditional graphic design as well.

Where do you find inspiration?Most of my inspiration comes from one of three places:
(1) Music. Music is huge for me. It's this intangible, elusive thing that conjures up unique imagery and memories – a realtime composite of everything I've known and experienced.
(2) A simple, compelling image. I've been capturing and cataloging every image that jumps out at me for one reason or another for the past five years. I review them periodically, especially when I'm starting something new. Recently I started posting them to a Tumblelog at http://inspiration.mikecreighton.com.
(3) Concepts. Oftentimes I find myself caught up in a desire to act on concepts that roll around in my head. Themes. They're the things that surface that help each of us make sense of the world around us, and they're our unique way of seeing things. This is pretty general, but it gets me stirred up enough to want to create.

Do you have a favorite artist and if so who and why?I'm always inspired by figurative artists. Egon Schiele will forever wow me through his efficient use of line and texture to capture the essence of his sitters, while still tending towards judicious use of abstraction.
I'm in awe of Jenny Saville and Mark Demsteader. Some other contemporary artists tend to be illustrators or concept artists. Folks like James Jean (http://ww.jamesjean.com), Joao Ruas (http://www.feral-kid.com), Jeff Simpson (http://surrealsushi.com), Melissa Cooke (http://melissacookeart.com), and Michael Ciervo (http://www.michaelciervo.com). They all bring you into this alternate reality – a view unique to them and them alone. There seems to be this embedded narrative behind each character and scene they portray, and that makes each piece infinitely more interesting to me. Not to mention the sheer skill these artists possess.

Where can my readers see you`re work?A more formal collection of my work exists at http://mikecreighton.com. But I'm always posting in-progress works as well. You can find the more traditional in-progress work (drawings and such) on my Flickr stream: http://flickr.com/photos/mikecreighton. And you can find digital experiments along with analogue ones on my blog called TODAY, CREATE (http://www.todaycreate.com).

culture? Mike Creighton!