K. Imperial Fine Art

Michael Cutlip’s paintings with their highly individual style and color palette have become a recognizeable force in the Bay Area art scene. 

Michael Cutlip’s paintings are intricate collages where a playful world unfolds. Random imagery, colours that reference the 1950’s kitchen and gestural markings are combined with wry visual wit to create a sense of order in disorder.

Cutlip’s work explores process and as the artist has stated, “The process is essential. I work in the moment. In my experience, a planned painting is a failed painting. The painting must be free to wander. The best works are those that seem to simply happen”.

These layered compositions are created with a variety of media and techniques that include found objects, spray paint, acrylic, oil and collage.

Michael has that elusive quality that artist’s strive for.  He can change and respond to a painting in the middle of the process while constantly challenging the work by inserting something unexpected and improbable.  It is in resolving these disparate elements over and over again that he has honed his craft and found his own very clear voice.  His work is consistent and finely realized and yet he is full of surprises, incorporating the unexpected at every turn and finding a way to make it work. 

Michael Cutlip grew up in Belmont and was attending Cal State in Hayward studying business when he took an art class to fulfill a requirement.   The instructor saw something in Michael and encouraged his talent.  Cutlip changed his direction, getting his degree in art and dedicating himself to the pursuit of, as he puts it “that one fantastic painting”.  There have been many along the way, and Cutlip has shown his work in galleries across the United States, Canada, and Japan.