​Michael's story as an artist began around the age of 17, when he noticed he possessed some facility for drawing accurate sketches with pencil, pen and ink. Already an avid fan of SciFi and Fantasy novels, he delved into the visual work of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Michael Whelan's earliest Art. To better mimic the work, he picked up colored pencils and by the age of 20 had discovered innovative techniques to give his detailed pieces a rich, painterly smoothness. But it was painstaking and people wanted larger and larger pieces, so Michael finally made the transition to oil paint, working on larger canvasses and "re-inventing the wheel" as he slowly taught himself the tricks and disciplines of that particular media. Throughout his 20's he made a living of sorts, doing mainly commission work for various private parties before becoming disenchanted with demands to match color swatches instead of the detailed reality which fed his inner "creative demons". In 1992, aged 30, he discovered computers and the digital world. Astonished by the power of Adobe products, he put down his smelly paints, picked up a camera and embraced the new technologies, expanding his image making skills into more commercially viable directions. He still paints, but now works only on personal projects or the mixed media projects of his conceptionally innovative work with humans and fractals. Below is a sampling of his original paintings over the many years.