In a past life, working as a museum night guard, I would borrow a wheel chair and silently roll through the galleries, flip on the lights, and sit alone for hours looking at various paintings, exhibitions, and retrospectives, asking just the question, "How can the use of variation breath life into a painting?â€
-Mike Stack
Stack creates a drawing of great depth using just pen and ink. Hundreds of overlapping black marks form a dense, rich texture contained within a clean, balloonlike silhouette. Stack is interested in variation as an important principle in art and design. It is the slight variation in line quality and density that creates visual interest. It is variation that leads to an under-standing of chaos.
Stack attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and received his BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Purchase College, State University of New York.
