All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.  Francis Bacon

MICHAEL BLAZE PETAN - Born Chicago Il. -  Born and raised in Chicago and attending the Art Institute of Chicago, after 35 years in Chicago, Michael migrated to Mid-Coast Maine to become immersed nature and the seasons. Bremen shares a similar humble and hardworking attitude much like the South Side of Chicago. Living with his family year around on the working water front of Bremen, Maine provides that sense of place. Mythic Maine summers are balanced with the solitude of long, cold and often deep crisp white winters. This literal “White Space” slows time and provides the pause and stillness for personal exploration, mindfulness  and artistic observation. Choosing “stillness, silence and solitude” over escape, Michael believes he might get closer to a more honest attempt at “Visual Truth.” His work reflects the cultural collision between politics, culture, myth and the unending battle between human nature vs. mother nature.  The clash of the big cities concrete,steel, glass and humanity vs. woods, water and salty air. The results are a kaleidoscope of color, hyper active and vibrant, the rules are few if any. Each effort embraces chaos and an uncertainty and the bottled up anxiety of being human. His medium is mashed up and mixed and unlimited from color pencils to spray paint to bees wax to anything goes. If it can suggest a motion and emotion it's  exploitable. 

Michael’s biggest influence in Art School wasn't in painting but in Film Studies taught by Stan Brakhage. Brakhage a mythic independent film maker explored landscape in Cinema, combining nature, magic, mayhem, poetry, patterns and painting directly onto film.  Brakhage encouraged a highly personal, intense and independent approach to artistic expression. Brakhage set the "intensity" bar high and the challenge is to capture that Film-matic Energy  and Motion  into single static painting. The challenge is to capture a story, a moment in time a blurred polaroid,  a snap shot of human emotion, grandeur and intrigue.   Like life, it’s a work in progress.