Hello,
I'm Michael Barrett.
Portfolio
Writing
At Substack, I write semi-regularly about current art projects, travel, and things.
Two nights in Kanazawa
November 4, 2022Our bullet train quietly slid into Kanazawa. We collected ourselves and exited the train station beneath a giant metal and glass canopy fronted by an elaborate and beautiful gate. We found the taxi line. On the train I prepared my iPhone’s translation app with our hotel’s address. I showed this to the driver and said the name of the hotel, he read the address, and repeated the name of the hotel. We were there in 6 minutes. We dropped our backpacks and freshened up. I dropped 3lbs of Yen in coins from my pockets onto a table then immediately left to occupy ourselves. The jet lag followed us from Tokyo and was catching up fast.
Two nights in Tokyo
November 1, 2022We arrived at Narita airport and blearily made our way through immigration and customs. We were greeted outside of security by an associate of our travel agent. She whisked us outside to meet a driver who shuttled us silently from the airport to our hotel.
Thoughts on AI Art
November 1, 2022The robotic meat grinder for images is now available.
October snapshots
October 12, 2022And a brief aside about Instagram
Diner
October 9, 2022A new painting of time passing, filling the pool, and ordering coffee
Diego in San Francisco
September 28, 2022But first donuts
Art crawl for one
September 5, 2022I extended my 3-day Labor Day weekend into 4 days by taking Friday off from work. I slept in, took the poodle for a quick bathroom run around the block, then returned to dawdle over oatmeal for breakfast. I added enough frozen blueberries to make it deep purple and added enough granola and maple syrup to make it taste like candy. I drank lots of coffee.
New work; an artist's profile; can I have a pony?
August 30, 2022New work Over the weekend I found the time to photograph some new(ish) works on silk. This first piece is a further iteration on a Uniqlo portrait study, poppies, and the neighborhood pool. In this next piece I played with just graphical, geometric elements and snapshots of flowers from walks in the St. Johns neighborhood.
Welcome to fabulous Art Vegas
August 12, 2022We took a long weekend to visit Las Vegas for work and for play. I love Las Vegas enthusiastically and without irony. The strip is unapologetically crass and transactional, which makes it’s the most honest place in America. Las Vegas seeks to sell you happiness. Sometimes it’s a bargain, sometimes it’s lavishly expensive. Las Vegas does not judge. Every desire is represented. This makes Las Vegas a good town for art.
Website refresh
August 1, 2022What is it you say you do here?
About
I grew up in Charlotte, NC. I attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After a brief stint painting murals and working in galleries, I completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, I began to experiment with web development, digital imaging, and large format printing.
After graduate school, I found my way into a software development career. I have worked primarily as a front-end engineer but I have also done full-stack web and service development in Java, C#, and Python. I have worked extensively with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and has worked with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Lately, I likes to say "JAMstack" in meetings to see if anyone notices.
I prefer VisualStudio Code as my JavaScript editor on macOS. I prefer Procreate on the iPad for painting. I prefer Sketch on macOS for creating web graphics. PixelmatorPro is pretty nice too.