A new series of works by artist / engineer Michael Hutchison explores the human body in movement and change. The pieces depict rapidly alternating yoga poses with their shifts in balance, contractions, expansions, twists and turns. Over time, and in response to the fleeting nature of the subject, the methods of painting became ever more direct. The canvas developed into a visible record of the process: warming up, working out compositions, attempting to depict a figure in motion. None of the mistakes or hesitations could be removed or painted over without compromising the energy of the piece and these imperfections were embraced as something entirely human.

Michael Hutchison

I am an artist and engineer from Edinburgh, Scotland. After studying an engineering degree my need for balance and self expression led me to undertake a more informal fine art education; studying an art and design foundation diploma and at various night classes around the UK. During this time I have developed as an artist greatly influenced by the art of the past, but also by many influences outside the visual arts: from literature, music, philosophy, architecture, science and the natural world.

Perennial themes I use art to explore include the illusion of permanence; the struggle of opposites; the place of the irrational in a society favouring the rational. My work is a mixture of drawing, painting and sculpture. Still a practicing structural engineer, I particularly enjoy the dichotomy between disciplines, using one to counterpoint the other. I currently work from a studio space in North London and have exhibited work in Edinburgh, Newcastle and London.

Artist Statement

Our world is uncomfortably ephemeral and art provides some consolation to this. I see the inevitable process of disintegration and reformation occurring through the struggle of opposites. Painting for me is a way of representing this: paint becomes simultaneously distinct and nebulous, rationalized and ordered as much as it can become chaotic and disordered.

I often use the contrast between regular, geometric forms and sinuous ones as a point of departure. Increasingly, my paintings aim to be somewhere between the representational and the abstract, never becoming entirely one or the other as a way of opening up possible interpretations. For me created images have the potential to give meaning to the flux of it all, even if only fleetingly.