Creativity After Hours: The Visual Evolutions of Michel Gagné

Creativity After Hours: The Visual Evolutions of Michel Gagné
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"I was obsessed," he says with a chuckle. "For two years I was very dedicated. It was very freeing. Man, I didn't have to answer to anything. I didn't have to answer to any aesthetic. Anything goes. I was doing wild stuff. It was freedom. Definitely.

Gagné's intriguing "Contested Borders" painting. © Michel Gagné.

"I had my first show ["Contested Borders"] at Warners. I was scared to actually show that stuff at Warners because I'm thinking here are these cartoonists and I'm there with this wild artsy-fartsy stuff (chuckles). This is not Prelude to Eden. They're going to throw tomatoes at me."

To Gagné's surprise, "It went really well. I sold quite a few paintings at the opening, so that was awesome. It was great. I couldn't believe that people would actually buy my crazy experiments. It was very motivating."

An example of Gagné's complex wood sculptures. © Michel Gagné.

Gagné later showed his work at several exhibitions, including Available Light Gallery in Burbank, Studio C in Valley Village, Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, plus L.A. Art Seen, Gallery Morpheus and Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills.

"Then I kind of lost interest in painting, which was interesting because I started moving into sculptures," Gagné says.

"I had done a painting for my wife Nancy, and it was on watercolor paper. Nancy wanted me to mount it on wood, so it wouldn't bend. So I cut a piece of wood, mounted the piece, and gave the painting to Nancy. I came back to my studio and I saw the remains of the cutting that I had done. So I took some glue and I started putting them together. I started hunting in the garage for every piece of wood that I could find, and pasted them together. I kept going back and forth, adding more pieces of stuff, and I spray-painted the whole thing black. I called the piece 'Potential Remains,' because in the wood remains I saw potential for something else. That sculpture was sold to a major collector in California who owns murals done by all these big names, like Henry Moore. That was actually my first sculpture."

"I'm still sculpting," Gagné says. "I don't know why I like it so much. I feel like I'm a little boy playing with his wooden blocks," Gagné chuckles. "I go into my studio and I play with my little wooden blocks, and I put them together and then I paint them."

The Written Word…With Pictures
"Then I went into a phase where I combined this old 18th Century illustration with this ink and collage technique that I had devised. I started reshaping and expanding upon them and bringing them into my world. That was the bridge for me into doing book illustration."

To Gagné, his books "are not a continuation of my animation but a continuation of my fine arts, starting with my painting. It evolved from that."