In the summer before art school, Mike Ulrich took a part-time job as a billboard painter, a stint that evolved into a 30-year career. He soon established himself as one of the premier billboard painters from New York to Boston.

 

All along he managed to maintain a connection with oil paint and canvas, but one which he modestly describes as "Sunday painting."  "I wish I could have painted more”, he reflects, “but I was busy, and at the time there was an endless supply of work…hundreds of feet in the air. However, consciously or not, I did learn a lot about form and color.”

Billboard painting, like other trades, succumbed to computerized technology, and Mike cashed in his sign painter’s enamel and brushes for a large-scale ink jet printer. The move afforded him time to return to his prime passion – oil painting. “With the new direction in business, I’m again painting for myself and I love it. Whether I’m taking a walk or driving my truck, I’m forever visualizing the world terms of painting. I can find

a painting anywhere and everywhere.”A profound influence for Mike Ulrich is the 19th century painter, Isaac Levitan, who he says, “was completely at one with his craft and his environment as he created powerful works from what would be the mundane to an inattentive eye.

 

In recent years, I’ve paid great attention to geographical entities I grew up with, such as Charles Island (a small uninhabited dot of land just off the coast of Milford, accessible by foot at low tide via a sand bar isthmus). As a boy, it was the backdrop of my summers – a means to measure time, both past and present.”Mike shares the Hudson River painters’ perception of light, both technically and poetically. “I love Church's painting of West Rock (a stretch of iron-colored basalt cliff flanking New Haven, Connecticut). The light he captured in that work is timeless. It can still be seen on a sunny summer’s day.

 

In recent years, I’ve painted the cliff face from a variety of vantage points, in different seasons and at various times of day.”Mike Ulrich’s landscapes of local terrain are striking for atypical geometric compositions within a restrained, controlled use of the palette. He states, “I learned from the painters I admire, and even from my years as a billboard painter, that color can easily be abused. Nature is a riddle wrapped in a mystery. It has its own rules and its own palette, one that can truly take a life time to understand. It’s an enigma I strive to solve."

 

The artist lives and works in the Milford area of shoreline Connecticut.

 

--Lawrin Rosen, President of ARTfx