Michael Giles is a Venezuelan-American artist working primarily in painting and drawing. He has exhibited nationally including SITE: Brooklyn (Brooklyn, NY), Core New Art Space (Denver, CO), Channel To Channel (Nashville, TN), William King Museum (Abingdon, VA), Crosstown Arts (Memphis, TN), Walters State Community College, Carson Newman University, and Fluorescent Gallery (Knoxville, TN). Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, at the age of five he immigrated with his family to Baltimore, OH. He studied as part of the Reciprocal Exchange Program at Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia, 1996) and received a BFA from The Ohio State University in 2000, and an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2007. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. He lives and works in Knoxville, TN, with his wife and son and various furry animals.

My work stems from finding pattern and rhythm in the world around me. The paintings began from finding places and spaces between words and lines in the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. These spaces/rhythms/patterns serve as the beginning of the paintings unto which I add color, line, and paint. The colors and patterns come from instinctual spaces in my head; they are worked and worked over on the canvas in layers which are considered, covered, and combined. Taking a cue from the Deleuzian “becoming” my paintings are an attempt to find a new meaning from these disparate influences; an attempt to combine text into visual language; an attempt to find a new impetus to make art.