Beer With a Painter: Michael Berryhill
“You can’t think your way through a painting,” the artist said during our conversation at his home studio in the Catskills. “You can only act, mark, or feel your way through.”
ELLENVILLE, New York — The word “GUILLOTINE” was drawn in charcoal capital letters on the wall of artist Michael Berryhill’s basement studio when I visited him in November, shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Berryhill was fired up about the state of the country but optimistic. His home is a museum piece of the 1950s, with plywood floors, ranch-style corner windows, and pink-tiled and wallpapered bathrooms. But the way he and his wife, musician Eleanor Friedberger, use it feels like a form of resistance against that period of conformity: In addition to the basement studio, there is a music studio and small performance space. The upstairs living room, where we talk over a late-afternoon beer, is filled with color, mid-century furniture upholstered in pink and yellow, and patterned accents.
Berryhill’s painting, too, enacts its own form of resistance. Although his is a vibrant palette of pinks, oranges, blues, and yellows, it’s also trippy and electric, especially under the fluorescent tube lighting he prefers. It’s too passionate for a Garden of Eden and more aligned with the unsettling nature of Philip Guston’s pinks. And while his paintings are generous and luscious, he always favors a dry brush — drawing into the weave of the linen canvas and using it as resistance, scraping away as much as he adds. He both forms and resists image-making, with some paintings clearly depicting lions, birds, figures, tabletops, and the sun and others shying away from figuration.
Michael Berryhill was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1972. Berryhill received his BFA at the University of Texas (UT), Austin in 1994 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before graduating with his MFA from Columbia University in 2009. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery, Kate Werble Gallery, and KANSAS Gallery in New York City; Night Gallery in Los Angeles; La Maison de Rendezvous in Brussels, Belgium; and Galería Marta Cervera in Madrid, Spain.
