Mike Montgomery is a songwriter, musician and recording engineer and a member of the music groups R.RING, Nervous Verbs and Ampline. He owns and operates Candyland Recording Studio in Dayton, KY.
Colin Montgomery is his son and constant companion on fantastic adventures, real and imagined. He is four years old.
‘Eye Goop: Consensual Warble’ is their second collaborative show.
Mike: I’ve been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, though the last three decades have seen that passion typically relegated to zine covers, show posters and album art—i.e., I would make a picture when the need to have one was there.
When Colin was born, we were suddenly surrounded by children’s books full of bold colors, whimsical drawings and wild, imaginative creatures, and I found myself falling back in love with doodling.
Before Colin was one year old, in the midst of the pandemic, we moved into a new house. The walls were totally blank; unadorned. My wife was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer shortly thereafter, and the climate in our isolation bubble was pretty dark and heavy. I started drawing and painting just to make him smile and I began taping pictures over every surface to force some color back into our world.
Colin seemed to delight in the idea that I could pull an image out of thin air and put it on paper, and he was excited to join in. At first, he would draw, color or paint on top of whatever picture I was working on, but he soon started drawing his own images and asking me to add to them. I love how we always take each other’s pictures in directions we wouldn’t have imagined on our own.
The pieces in this show are pulled from the hundreds we’ve made over the last three years, and you can really see his progression from naïve, squiggly pen strokes to refined lines and full character and scene development. We work with ink, crayon and paint on paper, cardboard, wood, and rocks collected from the neighborhood.
Not every image is a collaboration -- some are solely Colin’s and some are solely mine, but they were all made with us working elbow to elbow, and if nothing else, they help encapsulate many, many moments that I hope to hold in my heart forever.
Thank you to MOTR for the opportunity to share our work.
All proceeds from sales of these works will go directly to support the continuing medical care for my wife, Colin’s mom, Lauren Foster.
Thank you!
-Mike and Colin
Contact the artists/ purchase art:
Direct Link to Lauren’s GoFundMe
https://gofund.me/389331d5
