Mik Godley

 Background

Mik Graduated with a BA Hons in Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic in 1982, then a Masters in Creative Collaborations at Nottingham Trent University in 2006. He is now based in Nottingham and works as a painter, art-school lecturer and iPad artist.

He is interested in digital and internet art, using traditional paints to 'painting' on an iPad, and a mix of both, using traditional paints, but painting in pixels. Mik has become one of the best artists of drawing using iPhone and iPad apps in the region and his work both on and off screen demonstrates his drawing talent.

Considering Silesia

This project examines issues of conflicting heritages, cultural memory, identity, displacement and migration. He focuses on his own family's connection to Silesia, the formerly German and now mostly Polish region of Central Europe. 

His earlier works (from 2003) within this project shows Mik's fascination of the possibilities of digital art. The series of small paintings, arranged in a grid, uses a range of techniques to highlight the pixelated and low resolution of images that were captured at the time, of the Silesian hills, fields mountains and skies. 

After using traditional painting techniques to reproduce digital images, he then switched approaches, and started to use an iPad to digitally create artworks, in the style of traditional 18th and 19th century paintings. In this new series, Mik depicted the Walbrzych Mausoleum using his iPad, a complete contrast from the pervious series. 

Although throughout this project Mik explored a lot of other subjects, including oil and watercolour portraits of Silesian men and women, I think that these two small sections in his project highlight how artists can achieve the same notoriety and respect without having to fit into a mould. It's often said to young artists that they need to find their 'niche', something to become known by. To do this many are steered towards producing the same sort of art, with the same materials, wether that be all oil paints, watercolour, or digital. But Mik has done the exact opposite, he uses every sort of media he can, and that's what makes so may people value his art in ways most wouldn't expect. 

It's the fact that Mik doesn't stick to one media that interests me, he pushes the boat out and explores everything he can. He wants to experiment, and doesn't let the fact that he's a professional artist with expectations stop that.