Michael Cusack
1960
(AUSTRALIA)
IRISH
Michael Cusack is an Irish-born, Australia-based abstract painter. His work is painterly, emotive, dramatic, and evocative of the struggle between forces of nature. He lives and works in Byron Bay.
Education
Cusack earned his Diploma of Fine Arts from Hunter Institute of Technology in 1997 and his Master of Visual Arts degree from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. In 2014, he was awarded the Cité Internationale Des Arts residency in Paris by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). While maintaining a full-time studio practice, he also teaches at the Byron School of Art.
Technique
Cusack employs a highly physical technique, full of striving and intense focus. He takes a layered, inquisitive, painterly approach to his work. He builds his surfaces up with color, coaxing shapes into existence. The push and pull of warm and cool hues creates the illusion of depth and space, while visible brush strokes reject illusion, calling attention instead to the hand and mind of the artist....
Cusack works in a way that is both formal and conceptual. His process is physical and visceral: a negotiation between paint, surfaces, and the forces of his technique. Behind the technique is a rhythm that is trying to communicate through the composition.
The struggle between the straightforward elements of technique and the metaphysical aspect of ideas is evident in the labor-intensive presence of the work.
Inspiration
Cusack is inspired by the urge to understand his own instinctual visual language. His lexicon is related to nature, built on the importance of color, composition, the emergence of shapes and forms, the relationships between layers, push and pull, dynamism, and time.
He uses color to create drama. His shapes and forms are locked in struggle: sometimes color and space allow them to relax, other times the elements of the work push the composition towards conflict....
Longing is everywhere: Cusack is revisiting the past, searching for a way to the future. His striving pours out of his paintings, compelling not just the eye of the spectator but also the heart and mind.
His mature, formal understanding of paint and technique are mobilized toward the communication of something universal about human/animal nature.
Relevant Quotes
About his process, Cusack has said: “With every new body of work I am trying to re-write. Not a new language but trying to inform my current language with new codes, new rhythms, new passages. If the paintings tell a story it is their own, of shape making, of materials and a residue of experiences.”
Exhibitions
Cusack has exhibited his work extensively throughout Australia.
Collections
His paintings are included in numerous public and private collections in Australia, Asia, and Europe, including those of the Newcastle Regional Museum, Newcastle Art Gallery, Tweed Regional Gallery, the Port Macquarie Collection, the Lismore Regional Gallery, BHP Billiton, ABN Amro, Artbank, the Wycombe City Council, and Macquarie Bank.
Galleries
Olsen Gallery, Sydney and New York City
Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
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