Michael lives in Northport, Alabama, and spends his free time at the gym, working in his yard, or creating in his studio on the Kentuck campus. He got back into painting during the COVID shutdown, saying, “It helps me get out of my head, break up the stress of everyday life, and let those feelings come through in my work. I love watching a piece evolve in front of me.”
He likes working with colored washes and mixing different types of media, often letting each piece “speak” to him as it comes together. Texture plays a big role in his work, and he’ll use things like sand, raw canvas, or whatever he finds around the studio. He’s also a fan of painting on unconventional surfaces—like leftover wood or old cabinet doors.
Michael often blends acrylics, colored pencils, and other materials, and he’s been branching out into watercolors and even clay lately. As a current Studio Artist on the Kentuck campus in Northport, he says he really enjoys being surrounded by other artists and the creative energy that comes with it.
William Donovan Weathers II is a mixed media painter and illustrator based in Winona, Mississippi. Graduating from Mississippi State University with a Bachelors in Fine Arts degree in 2024, Donovan has been working as a full-time artist, muralist, and designer around Mississippi. He makes use of alternative mediums such as digital modeling and sculpture in tandem with traditional mixed media to create intensely chromatic, surreal scenery. His work speaks on themes of memory, archive, history, and subconscious identities.
Artist Statement
Throughout our history, the accelerating progression of technology and information has exploded our pretenses of experience and the self. It is not just sensational resonance in the moment, but an integrated techno-phenomenon that celebrates documentation as much as the subject. Archiving details only seen through our mechanical, digital extensions to be preserved and nurtured. These global advancements have hurriedly evolved our perceptions, transgressively rewiring human perception in its totality.
These rapid transformations of memory and sensation have reverberated chaotically throughout my life, flashing in moments I can only hastily observe while maneuvering through the waves of change. These phantoms of sensation twist and tangle themselves into knots within my subconscious, turning my creative practice into a necessary adaptation to our present reality. Revolving around digitally modeled and traditionally painted layers reiterating on each other, I meditate and unweave these “knots” through varied processes and visual languages. To paint and render these subconscious collections information, emotions, and reflection to give them a formal identity.
Despite the contrasts between our biology and our modernity, the fundamental presence of time and its own progression places these new experiences and our evolved habits on the same stage. Broken phones, burned pictures, corrupted files, and inactive social media profiles. Our technological pursuits have cultivated extensions of our own impermanence, even if their existence might last longer in a vacuum. Within that degradation, a place between the living and the forgotten, is where these “knots” exist in my work. A realm of vagueness, of collective expressions through history that I seek to untangle through my paintings. To tune and perform on straightened threads, such that its reverberations may resonate and begin to unweave the knot of another.