Artist Biography-Mike Odden
Having made art my whole life working with paint, sculpture, ceramics, printing, knife making many different media. I taught high school art for 31 years retiring in 1999. Feeling mentally drained, I quit making any art of any kind until 2014.
At that time choosing to use paint to tell my story, trusting my inner self to dictate direction by creating my language of shapes to make my art. My art is a journey a documenting through my life .
On my current series of the last 10 years I have found myself restricted to bright colors and organic hard edges. The search for my truth requires a slow application of paint creating shapes, there is a sense of auto-inclusion to the shapes I use, some call stream of consciousness free flowing or unconsciousness decisions, mind maps if you will. The repetition and variations of shapes that I have been using is like mental dancing comes to mind, that appear as endless convolutions of organic shapes that represent complex labyrinths with no end. Each work is a celebration of line and color It begins with the first color and first stroke.
As the work progresses I have conversations with the painting allowing it and my mind to make decisions. I do not title paintings until they are at the completion stage which comes naturally when the painting tells me to stop.