ABOUT MICHAEL SHUMIATCHER

An artist whose creative journey spans 5 decades in a wide range of media, including oil painting, sculpture, video, and sound. Shumiatcher's first medium was oil on canvas, as taught by his mentor in the late 1970s, American painter Peter Devine. Later, in college, he transitioned to sculpture, graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. Following art school, he showed in Halifax, Calgary, and Vancouver before entering a career in teaching, for which his art practice, while remaining active, took a back seat. Since 2010, Shumiatcher has refocused on his art, painting in oils once more, the passion of his pre art college years. Influences include American Social Realism and the Ashcan School of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and conceptual art movements starting in the latter 1910s, with artists like Marcel Duchamp, through to the 1970s. Differing influences in Shumiatcher's work - The Ashcan School, Minimalism, and conceptual art - can be recognized in the contrast between the formal simplicities of shape, colour, and surface quality combined with subject matter that aims to capture the likenesses and complexities of a moment in time.