MPiggott
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Please send all comments or questions to Mike Piggott directly
Telephone: 208 709 7272
Email: Studio@MPiggott.com
To request use of any images contact Studio@MPiggott.com
Mike Piggott finds resonance and beauty in the familiar. His subjects, anchored in the stuff of the 
everyday, are quietly captured in a moment of time. Each composition speaks to the art of silence and celebrates with a poetic quietude the beauty of the often overlooked. Whether painting sunbathers in the high heat of the summer, a still-life centering on a plated stick of butter, or a dream-like abstraction of birds on a wire receding into space, Mike Piggott’s work effuses a simplicity that begs for contemplation.
Piggott feels it is superfluous to place his art, a fundamentally visual experience, into words, thus emphasizing the artist’s primary concern with the formal aspects of painting. Piggott often paints the same thing over and over as if discovering his subject’s beauty anew, while focusing on constant experimentation with the technical aspects of color and composition. Often described as a colorist, Piggott uses his palette to inform the patterns, rhythms, and tone of the works. By creating very similar compositions Piggott explores how color can dramatically alter the mood and therefore interpretation of a piece. By using color and composition as navigational guides Piggott explores different ideas as he paints, often developing a greater understanding of the painting’s significance once it has been completed. Regarding meaning, the artist resists a discussion of interpretable unifying themes, instead being satisfied to invite the viewer’s curiosity to discover the mystery of meaning.
Within every composition Piggott strives to remove the trace of the ego and create a work devoid of any evidence of the artist hand. In attempting to eliminate his presence, Mike Piggott hopes to create a painting that stands simply for itself. As Piggott puts it, “The only way a painting has to make sense is in and of itself.” Yet although Piggott attempts to hide himself within the lines and luscious colors of his work he acknowledges an inevitable breakdown in his success, and where these attempts fail, the brilliance of the creative mind is revealed. It is at this juncture, where sterility softly gives way to the personal, one senses in Piggott’s paintings an overwhelming loneliness that transcends his conscious compositional intentions. It is evident in Piggott’s still lifes that he remains fascinated by the solitary element. Focusing on a single subject that is often easily overlooked, he both elevates the object while drawing attention to its everyday unimportance. But it is more than composition that causes his works to ache with isolation, and it is this lingering quality makes it impossible to look away.
Mike Piggott was born in 1963, Charlottesville, VA. He received his BA at Virginia Commonwealth University and studied at the Winchester College of Art, Winchester England. Mike Piggott has had numerous solo exhibitions at JH Muse Gallery, Jackson, WY, the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, Lynchburg, VA, and at the Neopolitan Gallery, Richmond, VA, and participated in various group exhibitions. Mike Piggott lives and works in Victor, Idaho.
