NEWS FLASH… My time in New Orleans is coming to an end. After 5 years, we decided to return to Arkansas, to live in Anne’s family home in Camden. The change will occur in November 2024. We are looking forward to new experiences and are ready to embrace new challenges, while already regretting what we will miss. (A short list would include Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Gulf shrimp, French bread, Creole cooking, doberge, specialty groceries and salad bars). On a positive note, I get a pool table (I had one in my bedroom growing up) and a bigger studio. I am grateful to the Artists’ Workshop Gallery in Hot Springs for reinstating my membership. Wish me luck!

COMING SOON… An all-Arkansas gallery on the Work page.

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ARTIST’S STATEMENT #8

 I create signed, limited-edition original photographs, presented in archival materials. I prefer to crop through the lens - I like to get close. I print in the size that best suits the image.

I have an eye for the unexpected and the weird; pattern and serial imagery; asymmetry and heightened color. Through digital filters, I often effect transformations in the original image through changes in hue, saturation, line and composition. I tend to compare the process to improve on the piano.  

I occasionally think of myself as a painter with a camera. I believe that any fool can take a good picture -- not every fool knows how or why. 

I am continually inspired by the pastel drawings of Edgar Degas; the watercolors of John Singer Sargent; the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank; and the 19th century Japanese ukiyo-e prints of Hiroshige, Hokusai and Kunisada. 

BIO

Michael has been an active photographer since the late 1980s, first publishing his Caribbean photographs with International Voyager Media, Miami. He has exhibited nationally and regionally, including art festivals, galleries and museums, and is included in numerous public and private collections in Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.

With his return to Arkansas, Michael is included in the Arkansas Artists Registry and has rejoined the Artists’ Workshop Gallery in Hot Springs, beginning in December 2024. While in New Orleans from 2019 to 2024, He was a member of Zele NOLA and Rhino Gallery. In Arkansas from 2013 to 2019, he was a member of the Artists’ Workshop Gallery and Local Colour Gallery, Little Rock, Arkansas. In the last few years, his photographs were exhibited in several juried exhibitions, including Small Works on Paper (Arkansas Arts Council), The Delta (Arkansas Arts Center); and PhotoSpiva in Joplin, Missouri. Michael continues to publish his annual calendar, using his photographs to illustrate the theme. For 2025, it is titled “Serenity Now.” Check out the Calendar Gallery on the Work page.  

Michael is also a museum professional, retired in 2013 as Curator and Program Director at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, Virginia. In years prior, he was Deputy Director for Programming (and formerly Curator) at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; and the Huntsville Museum of Art, Alabama. He served as Guest Curator for the William Baziotes exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy (2003-2004) and is currently Editor of the William Baziotes Catalogue Raisonné.

He holds a BA in Art History from Cornell University and an MA in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills, with graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and UCLA. He is married to Anne Guthrie, former historic preservation and city planner. They live with their vizslas Sofie and Jake, who is now blind, but doing great. Michael calls New Orleans home, where he grew up and attended Newman School. Born in Tampa, Florida, but remembers nothing about it.

ABOUT WILLIAM BAZIOTES

“In 1977 I became acquainted with the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter William Baziotes (1910-1963) while serving a summer internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Subsequently, during an internship at the then National Collection of Fine Art, I focused on Baziotes work for the summer project and became lifelong friends with Ethel Baziotes, the artist’s widow.

Thereafter, a major paper on the artist was written at the University of California, Santa Barbara; another at California State University, Dominguez Hills during my masters’ program. I curated a retrospective exhibition at the Newport Harbor Museum of Art, California. In 2003-4, I organized and contributed a major essay to the exhibition William Baziotes, Paintings and Drawings, 1934-1962 for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

The Catalogue Raisonne has become a decades-long project. For more information, please return to the Home page and click on the gallery William Baziotes Catalogue Raisonne.

For information about Michael's photography or the Baziotes project and to receive a catalogue raisonné form, contact Michael at mpreble@verizon.net; visit him on Facebook; or visit the Baziotes’ Gallery.