American · Contemporary
Michael Creese
b. Chicago, Illinois
Michael Creese is a contemporary American painter and illustrator based in Pittsburgh, known for oil impasto paintings of moons, seas, animals and flowers built from thick, visible strokes of paint.
1 work in the collection
Works by Michael Creese
Michael Creese is a contemporary American painter and illustrator who works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He paints mainly in oil impasto, laying the paint on so thickly that each stroke of the brush or palette knife stays raised on the canvas once it dries.
Life in brief
By his own published biography, Creese was born in Chicago and moved to Pittsburgh with his family as a child. He trained at Carnegie Mellon University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He has worked across many media, including watercolor, but describes oil as the material he keeps returning to.
Style and technique
Impasto is an old technique (Rembrandt and Van Gogh both used it), but Creese pushes it toward pure surface. Skies are built from ridges of color rather than blended gradients, so light seems to sit on top of the canvas. His subjects are broad and approachable: night seas, crescent moons, koi, hummingbirds, horses, a bison skull. Many of his images circulate as prints and on decorative tile murals as well as in original oils.
Moon
The catalogue's Moon shows his method clearly. A thin crescent hangs in a sky churned with violet, rose and slate-blue paint, and its light breaks into short, broken dabs of cream and gold across a dark sea. Look closely at the water and the moonlight is not drawn as a reflection at all: it is a scatter of separate knife marks that only read as a path of light from a distance. For other night pictures in the catalogue, see Dark Academia.
Where to see his work
Creese sells originals directly to collectors and publishes his images as prints. We have not found records of his work in museum collections, so his own website and print platforms are the most reliable places to see it.
Questions & answers
Who is Michael Creese?
Michael Creese is a contemporary American painter and illustrator based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He works mostly in oil impasto, building his pictures from thick, raised strokes of paint, and is known for moonlit seas, animals and flowers that are also widely sold as prints.
What is impasto painting?
Impasto is a technique in which paint is applied so thickly that brush or palette-knife marks stay visible and raised after drying. It gives a painting physical texture and catches real light on its ridges. Creese uses it for almost all of his oil paintings, including his night skies and seas.
What does Michael Creese's Moon painting show?
Moon shows a thin crescent moon over a dark sea, set in a sky of violet, rose and blue clouds. The moonlight on the water is made of separate thick dabs of pale paint, a typical example of his impasto style.