Michael Dandley, an artist based in New Hampshire, crafts vibrant, transformative works out of the ordinary. At times, the artist is commenting on our impact on the natural world; elsewhere, he captures the engrossing beauty out of our sight. Though not all carry the surreal weight of his wilder images, all contain a certain serenity in the artist’s choices of palette and perspective.
Within the medium of gouache on paper, with some notable injections of ink, the artist’s linework moves between granular and broad. Development and topics like the growing acidity of the world’s oceans are depicted. A recent exhibit at Nahcotta in New Hampshire offered this take: ” … Fearless in its hyper-pigmentation and bombastic imagery, consistently renders what could have been misconstrued as a straightforward and quotidian landscape, cityscape, or tableau, into something paranormal and fantastical.”
Dandley graduated with a BFA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2013, before settling in Portsmouth, N.H. His works have appeared in exhibits at LeMieux Gallery in New Orleans, Denver’s Helikon Gallery, and others.