Michael Steven Platt

I am self-taught in art and photography since grammar school, developing and utilizing my own techniques and styles. I have been a doodler all my life and take that ability to extremes with my enjoyment of detail, love of color, sense of design, affinity for balance and depth and my active imagination. I also create with the written word through poetry, stories and twisting the English language, and have published two books as well as an unusual and multi-faceted alphabet coloring book.
I play with the interactions of color, blending or contrasting the sensations that engage my eyes and stimulate my thoughts. I try to make the eye want to wander, to move and flow with the static activity produced in the forms, depths and chromatics of my work. I tend to offer busy-ness in perspective that draws the viewer’s attentions in among the intense detail in the execution, and then returns awareness to the bigger, over-all picture.
With a camera my eye and mind are always interacting, putting focus to framing patterns, colors, shadows and light, looking at the world as a continually evolving opportunity for an interesting scene to appear. I enjoy capturing interactions and grabbing hold of a single moment within a particular situational flow. I look for humor as well as drama and representational imagery in such moments. I frame for contrasts and congruencies in angles and shadows, enjoying the interplay and potential confusions in visual cognitions.
Inspirations for my efforts have been the works of artists such as M. C. Escher, Peter Max, Joseph Parker and Victor Vasarely, and photographers Ansel Adams, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Jerry Uelsmann. Various ‘Op Art’ and psychedelic creations, popular in the 1960’s, influenced me t as well.
I grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago and reside there still.


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