Trevor winkfield biography of michael j

He shows at the Tibor de Nagy, in Manhattan.

Trevor Winkfield is a painter, writer,

Winkfield is also the author of several books. Recently, he published a book in collaboration with the poet Charles North titled Elevenses, which is published by Granary Books in an edition of 30 copies, all of which are signed by the author and artist. Trevor is a friend of many years. Over the course of several decades, and through the halls of many museums and galleries, he has done his best to teach me how to look at paintings, including his own, a few of which I proudly hang in my home.

He is a master at explaining what makes great paintings great, how they repay careful looking, and how to appreciate the excellence of less-great, but very good, painters. The imaginative world of his own paintings, inhabited by characters ranging from Egyptian gods, to roosters, to madmen, to famous poets, is an orderly delirium presided over by one of the brightest and greatest of palettes in contemporary painting.

We talked recently about all of this and much else. Here is part one of our conversation. Part two will be published tomorrow. Trevor Winkfield: Charles and I often meet in uptown Manhattan around a. Elevenses takes its title from this ritual—elevenses being the English expression for a mid-morning break. As designer of the book, I tried to make the book look as much like a medieval manuscript as I could, using as many colors as possible.

I hope the effect is one of handling an object rather than just reading a book, with my saturated images complementing rather than illustrating Charles' text, a text exemplifying our mutual love of journals, Dorothy Wordsworth's above all. What is it that you as a painter like about collaborating with writers? TW: I'm not a poet, though I wrote poems and short stories immediately after leaving art college in , and continued roughly through I wrote because I didn't know how to paint the paintings I wanted to paint, but I found I could I describe the elusive painterly scenarios in words.