Art Town is an upstate New York podcast hosted by Justin Baker. Each month, Baker engages in thoughtful conversations with regional artists and artisans, exploring their work, creative processes, and the lives they lead.

In this episode, I sit down with painter Michael Van Winkle, whose vivid, psychologically charged paintings explore the uncanny overlap between the everyday and the existential. Working with familiar genres—still life, landscape, and figure—Michael creates surreal tableaux where abstraction and realism coexist uneasily. His figures seem suspended between inner worlds and physical realities, evoking the moments where routine dissolves into revelation. The spaces they inhabit feel at once theatrical and introspective, imbued with an emotional texture that hovers between sorrow and strange delight.

We talk about how Michael constructs these visual narratives, his thoughts on drawing, surface, and what it means to find new experiences in old forms.

Michael received his BFA from Alfred University and his MFA from the University at Albany.

Insightful, intelligent, and grounded in the art world’s evolving narrative, Art Town is where regional voices find resonance.

To see more of Michael's work:
www.michaelvanwinkle.com
Or follow him on Instagram: @michaelavanwinkle

Theme music by Phantogram
Interlude sound: rain falling on a tomato plant
End credits by The Art Town Players

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