Mike Piggott’s paintings operate in a zone of curious stillness, one where his subjects are paused as if suspended in the thick air of recollection, some hybrid space where time simultaneously accumulates and dissolves. In his paintings of beachgoers, tabletops, fruit, flowers, cowgirls and cowboys, and the landscape of the American West, Piggott resists the spectacle of narrative or climax, focusing on presence and a particular, often mundane moment. He is a passionate and visceral viewer, excited and inspired by the places, people and situations he has witnessed. He paints like someone who pays close attention, not just to what’s in front of him, but to how it feels to stand there and take a moment in. This kind of observation necessitates Piggott’s patience and notion, and it is what gives his work a distinctive hum, modest and in gesture and subject, and reverberating with a lulling and peculiar nostalgia.
At the center of Piggott’s practice is a devotional attention to being. His work playfully investigates the experience of being human, especially in the everyday awesomeness of nature. His subjects are not necessarily extraordinary, yet in Piggott’s hands they become supernal and elemental, finding themselves somewhere pleasantly between Fairfield Porter’s warmth and Alex Katz’s crisp detachment. Piggott recreates moments with these subjects, sometimes faithfully, and other times skewed, flattened, or bathed in artificial light, as a means of exploring our experience as beings in time and in nature.
Piggott paints with purposeful constraint. His is palette is limited but never dull, his spaces and subjects flattened but full of nuance. Winsome and mellow as they are deliberate, the works of Sea, Sand, Sky are characterized by these planes of color, and by figures rendered with minimal detailing but precise character. Horizon lines are deadpan, with stark divisions between sea, sand, and sky, and the compositions are nearly symmetrical. There is a kind of psychological compression at work where the mundane is not just elevated in its portrayal, but also hollowed out and filled with quiet imminence. Piggott’s works wait for the viewer to recognize oneself, not necessarily as one of the figures on the beach, but rather as a presence just outside the frame, holding the memory like a postcard. These paintings make one stop and look, and then look again. The compositions, tones, and the subtle pleasures of Piggott’s formal decisions to draw one in, placidly accumulating resonance with each passing second spent with them.
Like Milton Avery and Marsden Hartley before him, Piggott utilizes shape not just an armature for content, but as content. He builds his landscapes with flat silhouettes and rhythmic shapes that recall the graphic landscape treatments of mid-century color field painters. Trees and ridgelines are simplified into vertical staccatos or soft-edged masses. Piggott reduces and refines to chase the feeling of each moment and experience, and the mood that comes after that moment has passed. In Another Day at the Beach, the figures cast long, unexpected shadows that serve less to locate the figures in space and more to suggest the temporal weight they carry. Piggott more literally takes queue from Hartley’s forms in Hartley’s Beach, but brings in his signature sense of whimsey and playful use of perspective as a small, pensive figure seemingly interacts with a large vase in the foreground. In paintings like Sunset, where the figures are rendered with a similar schematic economy, the bold arc of color overhead does not describe a real sky so much as the memory or idea of a sky. The result of Piggott’s exercise in perception, rather than illusion, is a moment more felt and recognized than it is seen.
In each painting, Piggott recalibrates the balance between color, shape, light, and feeling. The persistent observational rhythm in his work is a sustained exercise in presence. By repeating certain motifs like figures at the beach, clouds and shadows, and tables set with a single object, Piggott invites us into his practice of noticing. In returning to the everyday moment, and in reiterating it, sometimes again and again with imaginative variations, he tests that moment’s limits and its capacity for meaning. The second or third version of a scene doesn’t correct the first; it deepens the inquiry. With each iteration, the image shifts further from reportage and closer to something akin to meditation. In doing this, he suggests that the world doesn’t need to be reinvented to be felt more deeply. It just needs to be seen again. In this way, Piggott’s work becomes a quiet rebuke to distraction. It reminds us that presence is a practice, not a state.
Mike Piggott was born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1963. Piggott’s lived a few places during childhood, including the Presidio of San Francisco, before settling in Lynchburg, Virginia. Piggott attended Virginia Commonwealth University, receiving his BA, and also studied at the Winchester College of Art, Winchester, England. Piggott has had numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Maya Frodeman Gallery, formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY; Chandler Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, Lynchburg, VA; Visions West Contemporary in Bozeman and Livingston, Montana and Denver, Colorado; and at the Neapolitan Gallery, Richmond, VA. Piggott has participated in various group exhibitions, including those at Dairy Arts Center, Boulder, CO; The Jackson Hole Center for the Arts, Jackson, WY; and ArtsChicago, Chicago, IL. His work has been featured in Houzz Magazine, Homestead Magazine, Mountain Living, among other publications. Mike Piggott lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he spends his time painting and exploring the surrounding hills, mountains, valleys and basins.