When Mike Piggott arrived in the Snake River Valley, he drove in from Grand Teton National Park in the North and stopped at the lookout very close to where Ansel Adams took his famous photo of the Tetons. A bald eagle soared through the air and Piggott knew something was afoot. We’re lucky to now know the fruits of his powerful first encounter with the place he now calls home—a wonderful oeuvre of works that are at once playful and enigmatic.
With a rich understanding of art history, Piggott creates compelling and curiously biographical works that document the qualities of life in the American West that span old and new. The works nod to folk art and faux naïf, while toying with two-dimensional abstraction and color-field painting approaches. Mike Piggott’s images bring a haunting air even as they are pleasantly nostalgic—a celebration of nature and humanity rendered in paint. Inspired by diverse forebears like Milton Avery and David Hockney, Piggott doesn’t just paint—he plays with perspective and color, both in paint and printmaking, and more recently with his breakthrough iPad drawings.
There is a mercurial fascination with the fragility of life that Piggott communicates with his deft brushstrokes. He admits that he likes to skirt the mysteries and complexities of life for which we have few words that never seem to define the experienced sensations. He conveys this with his shadowy figures, be they ice skaters or cowgirls, his desolate cabins, and with the adumbrations of lakes or streams.
Mike Piggott was born in 1963, Charlottesville, VA. He received his BA at Virginia Commonwealth University and studied at the Winchester College of Art, Winchester, England. Mike Piggott has had numerous solo exhibitions at the Maya Frodeman Gallery (formerly Tayloe Piggott Gallery), Jackson, WY, the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center, Lynchburg, VA, Visions West Contemporary in Bozeman and Livingston, MT and Denver, CO, and at the Neapolitan Gallery, Richmond, VA, and participated in various group exhibitions. Mike Piggott lives and works in Victor, Idaho.