When you ask Michael Yewen: “Have you any particular artistic ambitions?”, he answers ”Just to save the world, have fun creating art with cool people and make a living from that. When something amuses me, I think of a funny scenario. Like lots of dogs all in driverless cars barking at each other out of control at the traffic lights. Then I toy with some ways to present it. Often the first scenarios I see in my mind are like a Peter Jackson movie, so I then need to greatly simplify them to create something that I can complete in a reasonable amount of time.”
Michael has had no formal art training, and credits the many Art School Taupo events that he has been to for his artistic know-how. However, he was always an artist – “I was a real pain to the teachers. I recall several times going to the teacher when I was five and asking that she get us some better paints that were not just water, and brushes that were not just straw, and canvas that was not a sack. I clearly stated that it was not good enough and how did they expect me to paint with this. In the end I gave up - we are talking about five years old here – and I suspect the artist in me died a bit. But it was unstoppable and re-emerged when I hit my early 20s, with vengeance. Sessions of drawing dragons while groups of people watched really inspired me as a young artist. It was largely the attention of the other people that really got me going. I had drawn plenty of dragons by myself in my room, so these were well practiced. “One of my motivating factors for pursuing a career as an artist is how much I enjoy colour and sound. I like getting ‘sunshine out of a tube’ on a rainy day. That’s how I see yellow paint. The opportunity to interact with amazing people like other artists and large numbers of people via my art are other reasons, and the chance to influence people with my environmental causes. I have to maintain a connection to nature and interestingly, I get energy from creating. These days I create pretty much all day when I’m not researching or learning.
Contact Michael here: Trooder
