Artist Focus: Michael Esch

Colorado-based artist Michael Esch has been a professional painter for more than 40 years and his realistic work is widely collected around the country. Fascinated by cloudscapes and landforms, Esch works include oil, acrylic and multimedia glass installations. He has also done numerous commissions ranging from small to large paintings for private, corporate and institutional collections.

Watrous Exit, oil on canvas, 48 x 60”

“Nothing worthwhile is easy or without challenge, and that is how I approach art,” he says. “My cloudscape and landscape paintings are a relatively straightforward way to express how I feel about nature, how striking it is now and how it may have looked hundreds of years ago. I will often erase human development from my work and paint as realistically as possible to convey an accurate vision of how my mind’s eye sees the environment. All too often, civilization creates ugliness; my work is a window into how nature may appear without human intervention.”

Touch Me Not Forever, oil on canvas, 24 x 36”

Esch continues: “I try to be as overt as possible in scale, movement and expression in the large-scale mural and multimedia installations. I painted the largest painting on canvas in the world at the Air Force Academy (1997), and it remains overpowering to viewers below. My multimedia glass installations are also about visual impact, nature in its unspoiled state and interaction with the work by moving past it. I hope that my art will impact the world in such a way that people can see the beauty of the natural world the way that I do and influence the preservation of unspoiled environments.”