Within my artistic practice, I maintain an interest in exploring the space between the two- dimensional and three- dimensional, hybridizing painting, printmaking and sculpture. I use painting as a matrix to work against and to stretch into the realms of other mediums. I look to painting to inspire color and form, and extract the formal qualities to reinvent the boundaries of painting.

In crappy bars and dank bathrooms, subway stops, and telephone booths, graffiti can be found almost anywhere, scrawled, sharpie layer upon sharpie layer. Names, dates, I love Sue, Sue’s a bitch, poems, truism, jokes, drawings. These uncensored statements are quick and direct, written alone, read alone and yet somehow open for interpretation. It’s not just what is written that I find interesting, but also the impulse to leave a distinct mark, to say something absurd, to offer truth or wit, or just to be flat out raunchy for all to see.

My paintings are influenced by art history, cinema and found images from a wide variety of sources. My creative process is rather intuitive: things I see, experience or read about trigger visual recollections. These in turn, filter into new associations and result in reconstructed images, which make a different kind of sense. The moods in my paintings are often highly theatrical. Manifestations of sentiment, nostalgia and tensions between beauty and decay are re-occurring themes that run through my work.

It's all just a subtle allusion to the noise, oblique non-linear narratives, and dappled and dimpled light that entails a epiphanic puff of time.

I probably enjoy the sight of crumbling concrete and twisted rebar as much as I enjoy cheeseburgers – and that, between you and me, is saying something. An obsession with the minutiae of history is always in the back of my mind on frequent trips to demolished buildings, industrial wastelands, and out of the way piles of rubble. I keep a collection of concrete fragments (poser archaeologist), and am fascinated by the peculiar concept of the museum. All of the above factors, though, are part of what I think is an artistic process.

In my group of watercolors, the Street Series, I have attempted to blend a sense of relaity with everyday societal issues. My world deals with a gritty textural life. This is an existence filled with dampness, cold, grime, and shadows. I have conured up scenes of homelessness, hopelessness, desperation, violence frustration and isolation. These are the things that I envision woven into the patterns of society. Snippets of human experience being played out somwhere, someplace. Whether it be introspection, query, empathy, or revolution, it is my hope to generate a response.

Inspired by the complexity of human interaction with the world, I create irregularly shaped multiple panel paintings that evoke a sense of longing and nostalgia about memory and place. I produce and combine discrete images that collectively exist as loose and fragmented narratives reflecting my (and our) recollection about and experience with the environment. I photograph my source images in my own surroundings – shooting digital pictures of urban and rural landscapes and people engaged with everyday activity.

Using language, I say something and nothing at once. There is power in words and suggestion as I ask the viewers to provide authorship through the filter of their lives, beliefs and unique circumstances. Through the various meanings, usages and entendres of language, I am provided infinite source material.

Although I am trained as a potter and an object maker, drawing and painting is an important part of my studio practice. CAD/CAM, graphic design, and vector language aesthetics have been influential in my understanding of how both drawing and sculpture come to be. The idea that all form can be quantified as a collection of infinitely scalable lines and points is changing the way I perceive objects. This raises the question of how important the "hand" of the maker is to create meaningful work.

Michael Genovese's idiosyncratic art making, results, in part, from his dual fluency with both hand-lettering techniques and inner city vernacular. By incorporating methodologies and materials relevant from his background, rather than through traditional fine art vehicles, Genovese communicates an existential agenda with a socially conscience message. Although autodidactic, traditional sign painting, including those genre specific processes and materials, inform his multi-disciplinary practice.