FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Michael P. Cassidy. Cassidy’s paintings, drawings, and prints emphasize a synthesis between traditional and experimental approaches to image making. Cassidy’s work challenges the viewer to reconsider the natural environment by skirting between recognition of image and surface. The exhibition will be on view January 15, 2009-February 15, 2009.
Michael Cassidy was born and raised in Michigan. A rural up-bringing created a deep seated connection to nature but an interest in art led him to the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend Kendall College of Art and Design. Cassidy soon found his place in the fine arts department. Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking in 2000 he continued making spiritually based, semiabstract works. Still an avid outdoors-man, Cassidy spent his free time exploring the natural world, but it wasn’t until a move to South Carolina for graduate school that Cassidy found nature an inspiration for painting. The vastly different natural environment of the South moved him to combine memories of adventures in the rural Midwest with new experiences in the swamps and forests of the South to make landscape based paintings and prints. Cassidy received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004, from the University of South Carolina, where he is now an instructor of drawing, design, printmaking, and painting. Living in West Columbia, he continues to draw inspiration from the diverse Southern landscape.
