We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael Weiss. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.

Michael, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

The art world is filled with contradicting messages. A field priding itself of not having any rules, while everone seems to have an opinion on which rules to follow for “good art” As a student in the realm of artistic education the bombardment of contrary opinions can cause confusion and feel overwhelming . Who do I listen to? This was a problem for quite some time during my education. After having recieved an MFA from Germany I continued to pursue another MFA in New York. I had taken this step specifically to learn new skills and techniques as I was under the somewhat naive impression that after completing 6 years of training I had already found my artistic voice. I sort of had, and I sort of hadn’t. New York challenged me to rethink my practice and the new skills I learned encouraged me to thrive for greater heights in my painting. The biggest struggle however in both institutions was between following what felt right to me and being open to the suggestions and critique of my instructors, I was there to learn after all. As someone obsessed with details, many a immediate reaction of my instructors was to tell me to “loosen up”, be “more gestural”, “paint larger”, try going “full abstract”, “be more free”. Was I not experiencing full artistic freedom yet? This worried me, and I had taken several attempts at these different suggestions but quickly noticed they actually felt restricting and disingenuous. Although ones gut feeling might point in a clear direction, an overthinker like me can quickly doubt themselves if several people say the same thing, thus I was in a constant state of uncertainty and doubt about my practice. I was to be granted an epiphany that resolved all that. In a critique with instructor Vincent Desiderio I expressed my struggle to please my teachers by trying their suggestions while feeling like I was wasting my time knowing it didn’t feel right. He took a moment to observe my work and said “No one would tell Jan van Eyck to loosen up”. That moment made everything click, and as banal as it sounds in retrospect, I finally understood that there wasn’t a problem with me or my painting, rather I was a different type of painter, one heavily inspired by the northern european renaissance and its extraoridinary emphasis on detail and observation of reality. A lesson in embracing one’s particularity rather than trying to fit a fashinoable norm.

Michael, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Inspired by the Golden Age of Exploration my work oscillates between science and art, between landscape and still life. Combining my admiration for 19th-century landscape painting and artist explorers such as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt with my infatuation for natural history, I create environments that act as living curiosity chambers or Wunderkammern. Though seemingly otherworldly, each piece is in fact rooted in or inspired by existing natural beings, formations, or phenomena. Each work is preceeded and inspired by careful research into various fields of the natural sciences such as botany, ecology, mineralogy, entomology etc. By presenting the familiar in unfamiliar ways, my work allows for a sensation of discovery and inquiry. Harkening to my predecessors Alexander von Humboldt, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Ernst Haeckel, I too seek to reconsile the tension between artistic expression and scientific objectivity, between romanticism and enlightenment. Akin to Jan van Eyck and other Northern Renaissance painters, I pursue the divine within the detail, devoting countless hours to create an object of Andacht in which my technical obsessiveness and meticulous mimesis serve the overall narrative of the piece. I further share the sentiment of da Vinci and Haeckel that the artistic rendition of nature is not an act of mere replication, rather an act of acquiring knowledge of nature. As we ourselves are a part of nature, nature is ultimately depicting itself in an act of self-reflection. Coming to this insight was not easy and the road to it was paved by constant selfdoubt. It took me several years of contradicting critiques and opinions to finally filter out those that actually mattered to me. It also required plenty of research and reading to eventually see how -what initally seemed like disparate interests and ideas- everything was connected and part of a greater whole.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Not necessarily a resource in the classical sense but I wish I had known earlier how easy it would be to get in touch with artists I admired. Social media, though we could argue how social it still is today, opened this door for me. For the longest time I had a similar relationship to artists I looked up to as many might with hollywood celebrities- they are out of reach, intangible and shrouded in mystery. I was very late to the social media party but quickly realised it was easy to reach out to other artists and I was positively surprised how open and generous everyone was. Connecting with like-minded creatives this way is definitely on of my favorite resources, it keeps me inspired and enganged while allowing for new encounters and possibly friendships.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I am in no position to tell anyone what to do with their money or what to invest in. I personally don’t understand the hype however. To me non fungible token might as well mean non tangible, because that is what they are, immaterial, a castle in the sky. To me the physicality of an art object ist very important, surface textures but also patina, the grime of time, all create a more meaningful experience with an art object in the sense of artistic authenticity of an artefact. Interesting however is the claim of uniqueness of the NFT, guaranteeing an “original”. Though this has apparently been proven to be false as many versions or copys quickly make the round anyway, it nontheless brings back the decade old discussion about the aura of the original. Walter Benjamin coined this term in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He claims the endless reproduction of images harms the power of the original piece. With this in mind there does seem to be an appeal for NFTs. However one could argue that mass reproduction of an art object can even enhance the aura or authenticity of the original. The best example would be the Mona Lisa perhaps, a comparetively negligible piece of Renaissance history made famous through its 1911 art theft and ambiguous smile due to its sfumato technique. Millions of reproductions and merchandise of Mona Lisa exist and yet thousands line up every day to catch a glimpse of the orginal past a forest of raised cellphones and inch thick bullet proof glass. Perhaps the hype of both are pretty similar. Either way in a time where our world is increasingly becoming more and more abstract and we continue to distance ourselves from reality in favor or VR and AI, I believe tangible art is more important than ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.michael-weiss-art.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michael_weiss_art
• Linkedin: https://de.linkedin.com/in/michael-weiss-118ba6204