Michael Denton was born in 1959 in Dorset and spent his teenage years living in California. It was during this time that he became interested in the powerful emotional impact that different landscapes and places have on us all - a fascination
which continues to influence his creativity today. On returning to England to attend art school he concentrated on video and film within a fine art context, working extensively with electronic media after graduating from Chelsea School of Art
(MA).
Michael started painting seriously in the early 1990s and has paintings held in private and corporate collections in the US and Europe. His paintings are made up of counter flowing picture planes combining aerial and elevation
views and exploring the relationship of scale between the fragment and the whole.
"As a child I was obsessed with aeroplanes and arial views and spent a lot of time looking at the garden from over the wings of my model planes.
Playing with "creating scale" and fantasising mountain ranges from rockeries has fed into my painting - I'm still fascinated by the similarities of vastly different scales - from panoramic vistas to minute detail in a rock surface. The
process, irrespective of the medium, is always about adding and removing layers. I make the paintings more abstract than the sequenced/moving imagery because there’s more time to look into them, but my aim remains the same: to trigger
suggestion and memories without swamping interpretation. A place, a time, somewhere between setting off and arriving."
Michael also writes and performs music. Some of his earliest pieces accompanied video work, which was screened
at venues including the Pompidou Centre, New York's Kitchen and Mumbai's Nehru Centre. His music and visuals are currently published and distributed under the name "Overlap". Overlap perform regularly at major festivals and art venues
including London's BFI, Hove Festival Norway and Tate Britain.
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