Biographical Information:
I'm Mike Wicks, a visual artist born and raised in Albany, New York, where a love of photography took root at age thirteen, kindled by my father. That early passion for capturing light and the natural world has never left me; it simply kept evolving. After relocating to Southern California, the coastline became my classroom, and years of SCUBA diving and underwater photography gave me an intimate, firsthand view of the ocean that now lives at the heart of my painting.
My journey into painting began in 2016 under the guidance of Alex Kube, a renowned animator for Warner Bros., who pushed me to loosen up and let go of control. That nudge sent me from brush to palette knife and eventually to fluid pour, a medium that finally matched the fluidity and movement I had always chased with a camera. Today I work primarily in acrylic fluid pour, using silicone oil, mica powders, and resin to create ocean, water, and land-based imagery rooted in the California coast.
My work has been exhibited with TOAA, CAL, WVAG, TAG, the Conroe Art League, and Jones Gallery, earning awards in both photography and painting every year I have competed, including first, second, and third place finishes and honorable mentions. My paintings are held in private collections, and I continue to show in juried exhibitions across the country.
Artist Statement:
Water has always felt like the most honest subject I could choose. It resists control, finds its own path, and reveals something different depending on the light, the angle, the moment you catch it. My work begins as what we think of as abstract, but with a clear purpose to reveal the water, ocean, and land images that live within the fluid and the flow.
Much of what I paint comes from years spent beneath the surface as a SCUBA diver and underwater photographer. These experiences give me an intimate understanding of how light bends through water, how color shifts with depth, and how movement takes on a different quality when you're fully inside it rather than watching from shore. Those images, seen through a lens and felt in the body, are the foundation everything else is built on.
I work primarily with acrylic paint, silicone oil, mica powders, and resin, layering color and chemistry to coax movementp. The silicone creates separation; the mica catches light the way water does at depth; the resin locks it all into a surface that still feels alive. What emerges, the foam of a breaking wave, the swirl of current beneath the surface, the moment just before a swell collapses, is my ultimate goal, pushing and pulling the paints to my will.
The ocean pieces in particular come from a long familiarity with the California coast and a genuine respect for what water does when it's left to itself. I'm drawn to the tension between power and stillness, between chaos and the quiet beauty that settles. Each piece is an attempt to capture something that won't hold still, which in the end may be why I keep returning to it.
