Artist Statement

Michael Hachey is a Worcester-based artist who has taught at the School of the Worcester Art Museum, Clark University, and Worcester State University. He holds BFA and MFA degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He was also a student at the Carpenter Center of Harvard University and an assistant in various projects at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT. Influential teachers have been the painters Lawrence Kupferman, John Thornton, Rob Moore, and Jeremy Foss. A life-long friend and mentor was the late Lowry Burgess.

For more than four decades my artwork has ranged across large-scale sculptural installations, on-site wall drawings, murals, paintings, drawings, and in the last three years, an additional counterpoint of writing. The present ricocheting between my writing and visual art has informed and affected my art via series of “drawings” -- semi-legible to illegible handwriting – from dense to evaporating fields across expanses of paper. 

Like most artists, I’m energized by both intellect and passion, ideas and feeling; and I continue to be at a loss to easily isolate each. Voracious reading, conversations with friends, family, colleagues, and students feed an internal mind-jazz. Fed by the history of ideas, science, and religion, the appetite for all remains. Laughable and pretentious as that sounds, my art is not so much a plundering and parading of these as much as it is a bearing witness to my own curiosities.

Certain that I’m not clinically synesthetic, nevertheless, I’ve always been affected by the resonance between music -- across many genres and cultures -- and the pure color of abstract painting. 

And to that natural but impossible question “Who’s your favorite artist?” -- in an all but arbitrary surrender, I’ll cite William Blake, Patti Smith, and Dorothy Napangardi.