Artist Statement

I have been involved in the process of  making art for as long as I can remember. I come from a family of visual artists including my father, James A. Mitchell, an architect, a cousin, William Baziotes, and my brother, James Michalopolous. Consequently, it has always seemed natural to be making art. I began my formal study of painting at Carnegie Mellon University, continued at the Silvermine Guild and later at the Art Students’ League, and Pratt Institute. My first experience exhibiting my work was in my early teens. I was represented by and participated in several group and two person shows in Connecticut and New York galleries in my late teens, while still a student. While at the Art Students’ League, I studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil, Joseph Hirsch, Sydney Gross and Morris Kantor, drawing with Marshal Glasier and printmaking with Harry Sternberg. I later continued my interest in making etchings and monoprints by joining the creative printmaking community of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.

The body of my work, whether still-life, landscape, interior, or non-objective, is focused on an interest in engaging the viewer in a temporal mystery and the physical beauty of the mundane. While journeying simultaneously through the realms of both microcosm and macrocosm, my work alludes to a preoccupation with the importance of all imagery as a depiction of what is seen and what is unseen. I aspire to picture the sacred in the everyday, striving for a digression into the edges of the mystical realm whether painting in oils, watercolor, mixed media or printmaking.