Mike Fantuz

Mike Fantuz Artist Statement

Mike Fantuz’ vision is fed by extensive travel and experience in aviation and exploration. His large-scale palette knife works invite the viewer above and into his aerial perspective on landscapes and cityscapes.

The paint is thickly applied, bold in colour, and based in Fantuz’ discipline to limit his tools to palette knives only. This forces an intuitive engagement with the colour and density of the materials over the minute precision that smaller brushes would afford.  Both the knife stroke and viscosity determine an aesthetic that reflects movement and abstraction; the stroke is wider, with bold impasto edges. This invites attention to tone, hue, contrast, and a more open compositional focus, which Fantuz embraces. The subject is seen from a distance rather than in tight close-up. Bright contrasts evoke the dynamic light play across a broad perspective visible only from a distance.

 Fantuz’ connection with his subjects and materials is personal and felt. He inherited his pallet knives from his grandfather, whose own artistic practice spanned decades. The knives carry layers of artistic legacy. Fantuz also brings his close relationship with landscapes to the canvas. His exploration work across multiple locations, as well as his aviation work above them, inform a broad perspective on our larger surroundings.

Bringing this perspective to his studio work is a meditation on the power of art to connect the painter and viewer alike to something larger than ourselves. Fantuz strives to honour this power. Quiet hours spent creating in the studio have a settling effect from mundane distractions and obstacles, opening avenues to larger levels of experience. Fantuz seeks these avenues in his time at the easel, with confidence that an individual’s deeper experience is closer to our collective experience, and that the viewer can enter along with him into the scale, perspective, and vision of his works.

Biography

Many artists speak of the accidental ways they found their path towards art — Mike Fantuz is not one of those artists. Born in Guelph, Ontario, the foundation of Mike’s artistic career began even before his birth, specifically in the 1940s. This was the decade Mike’s grandfather, Gastone Fantuz, immigrated from war-torn Italy to Canada and began his own artistic career.

 It was a gift from his aunt and uncle — his grandfather’s palette knives and easel— that shaped Mike’s artwork today, forming his characteristic method for creating original oil paintings in his distinct, American realist style with nothing but palette knives. It was this unique relationship to the use of palette knives that initially connected Mike and his wife, Emilie Fantuz, an artist who also employs palette knives and oil paint in her work. In addition to palette knives, Mike takes an artisan’s approach to each aspect of his work, stretching his own canvases using Canadian kiln-dried wood from renewable forests and archival, environmentally-conscious hemp canvas.  

​Today, Mike Fantuz continues creating artwork in his signature style, an emotive fusion of expressionism and realism, while carrying on his grandfather’s tradition of using palette knives. His work has been featured in several solo exhibitions and belongs in collections within Canada, the USA, Italy, and England and the collections of the Government of Newfoundland and the City of St. John's among others.