“Photoexpressionism” by Michael Pointer | Awards Collective GalleryTalk
The Awards Collective was created to feature the works of artist who have received either a Juror’s Award or Director’s Award in ASG’s Online exhibitions. Michael Pointer’s image Blue Cow with Sun received the Juror’s Award in the expressionism exhibition juried by Doug Chinnery. Michael’s exhibition Photoexpressionism is discussed in this GalleryTalk.
Artist Statement
“My work explores the deep and evolving relationship between photography and painting. Rooted in a lifelong practice of drawing and painting under the tutelage of my artist father, I came to photography with a painter’s sensibility. The darkroom became my studio, photo paper my canvas, and chemistry my paint. What I call Photoexpressionism emerged from this crossing of mediums influenced by abstract expressionism.
In this collection of work, I begin with an image that anchors reality and holds the truth of the moment. From there, I expand upon the metaphor through abstraction, gesture, and direct engagement with materials. Unlike the immaculate, technically precise black and white prints being produced pre-digital which I found sterile and derivative, my process embraces spontaneity and imperfection. I splash, drag, and layer photographic chemistry much as I would paint, inserting myself directly into the mechanical process. Each piece is analog and unique; I rarely use acquired images, working instead with my own photographs as raw material.
My influences are painters who pushed boundaries—Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Marin in particular. From Motherwell, I learned the courage of pouring one’s heart onto a surface; from Rauschenberg, the freedom to play with arrangement and collision; from Marin, the restless openness to possibility. Their examples affirmed my desire to work, as Rauschenberg said, “in the gap between art and life.”
Sometimes a poem serves as my entry point, it becomes a written sketch of emotion that guides the making without dictating imagery. The resulting works are not illustrations of words but carry a parallel resonance. In the act of making, I move away from the mechanical precision of photography and toward the expressive immediacy of painting.
Ultimately, I want viewers to experience not just the image but the surface itself, to sense the hand of the artist alive in the chemistry, the gesture, the accident. I have labored to challenge the boundaries of photography, expanding its metaphoric possibilities, and claiming space for the expressive, painterly mark within it.”
Michael Pointer
October, 2025
Bio
I am a fourth generation artist. I received my first camera at age nine and began formal art training at the Wichita Art Association and the Wichita Art Museum. At age 12 I also began to work in the darkroom under the tutelage of my father, Ed Pointer, a painter with an interest in photography. I grew up making art. In 1969 I had photography selected for the National Scholastic Art Awards exhibit in Wichita, Kansas.
I spent ten years on active duty in the United States Air Force. During this period I won several command awards for photography and for charcoal drawings. After a solo photography exhibit in Wichita, Kansas in 2000 I was invited to become a Lecturer in Photography at Wichita State University School of Art and Design and taught there for three years.
In 2009 I moved to Kabul, Afghanistan with the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project. While there I set up a dental laboratory to support a free dental clinic in southwest Kabul and taught Dental Technology to a group of young Afghan women and men. I also participated in taking dental treatment into imprisoned Afghan women and their children. Additionally, I became acquainted with Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA) where I lectured on my photography and became a member of their advisory board. CCAA teaches contemporary art forms to young Afghan women.