I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.
Michael C. McMillenArt is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.
Michael C. McMillenOne of the ongoing themes of my work of interest has been the idea of the inevitably of disintegration, of entropy, constant flux of matter, and so I've done a number of pieces that have explored those ideas. In the decline, there's a lot of beauty.
Michael C. McMillenBeing an artist is two things. You accumulate experience and time, and if you have something that's interesting, you have to be persistent. That's very important. There's nothing instant about it. It's a way of life, actually, where you choose to spend your life doing this activity called making art.
Michael C. McMillenI've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.
Michael C. McMillenWe're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.
Michael C. McMillenThe idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.
Michael C. McMillen