Michael Piotrowski is a Iife-long artist working in many media. Using his experiences as family photographer and his forty-year creative career as a Dance Lighting/Set designer, he captures light in his wood block prints and plein air paintings. He rekindled his passion for oil painting after a forty-year hiatus when a friend asked, “If not now, when?” A few years later, his long buried interest in printmaking reemerged through a master class opportunity at the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, NY.
Early painting classes in Utica, NY at Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute led Michael to a BS in Art Education with additional graduate courses in Photography and Art History from SUNY New Paltz, NY. He worked for regional dance companies in the U.S. and abroad. He also used his lighting talent in theater, musicals and operas, taught Dance Production at Brooklyn College, Lighting Design at SUNY New Paltz and Kingsborough Community College, and guest lectured at the Vassar College Dance Department.
In 2008, a chance meeting in a frame shop led to his studying plein air painting with William Noonan, a Hudson River Valley landscape painter which produced a body of landscape and seashore paintings ready to be exhibited.
A 6-year member of Wurtsboro Art Alliance and Represented Artist at the Wallkill River School & Gallery in Montgomery, NY since 2009, in 2014-2015, he was one of 15 artists partnered with 15 farms in a year-long Farm/Art Trail project co-sponsored by Orange County Tourism. Since 2009 his studio in Middletown, NY, he participates annually in the Orange County Arts Council Open Studio Tour.
In the Fall of 2014, he was on a waiting list for a Master Class in Printmaking with Rob Swainston at the Garrison Art Center. When a space opened up, it not only opened a space in the studio, it opened another way of expression, through printmaking, that has reenergized his art work, sending him in a new direction. The result of that class was a series of Revisited prints, recreating images from his oil paintings into a series of multicolored monoprints.
Michael has also studied wood block printing with Jeff White in the early stages of the Brigebuilder Project including the 2014 Steamroller Event at the Garrison Art Center. He currently studies with Melissa Schlobohm, also at the Garrison Art Center.
He was invited to participate in another Steamroller event in July 2016 at the Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute. This work and a body of prints created this summer and early fall will be presented in a Featured Artist Exhibit at the Wurtsboro Art Alliance, Wurtsboro, NY in November 2016.
Michael’s work is part of many private collections throughout the United States. His paintings and prints are currently exhibited in monthly group shows at The Wurtsboro Art Alliance, Wurtsboro, NY. In July 2014 he had a solo exhibition in Madison, NJ, and in October 2015 another solo exhibition, featuring his paintings and prints at the Wallkill River School Gallery, Montgomery, NY. This May, as a printmaker, he was one of 40 artists invited to participate in the Riverside Auction at Garrison Art Center, with Nicholas Lowry, Auctioneer.
“Printmakers traditionally make two primary types of prints, either monotypes [one-of-a-kind images] or editions [a limited number of exact duplicate images]. I have combined these two methods, printing a primary key image over an individual, sometimes similar, color monotype, resulting in a series edition [same primary image with a variety of color backgrounds].”