“If you invent your own language, you can say whatever you like,” Bertrand Russell
Paul Michael Graves is a painter, actor, and photographer based in New York City. He works with his own language of lines and dots which suggest the technological or diagrammatic. The nickname “technobabble” encapsulates Graves’ work; the technological made abstract. For Graves, painting is a meditation on line, shape, pattern and color. His patterns show what makes us human. When reading one of Graves’ paintings, the viewer is compelled to question why his patterns suggest the man-made. What differentiates the geometry we find in nature from the patterns of the built environment?
Graves’ compositions are clusters or minimalist fragments made up of elementary geometry. His technobabble language is a subconscious, spontaneous meditation where abstract shapes form patterns and connections across the canvas. They suggest an aerial perspective, an architectural element, or a puzzle. As an abstraction, these paintings reference nothing in particular. Yet, at the same time, they suggest an aerial viewpoint or an architectural design; drawn from Graves’ past experience as an Air Force pilot who studied mathematics and architecture before becoming a painter.
Paul Michael Graves was born in San Bernardino in 1976 and raised in Redlands, California. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the U.S. Air Force Academy and his Master of Architecture from Columbia University. He lives and works in New York City. Paul’s art studio is in the West Chelsea Arts Building in Manhattan. See Paul’s work here, here, and here.
Email: paul@paulmichaelgraves.com
