Micah Pearson, Las Cruces
Member Since May 2013
Artist Statement As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an artist.
Oh sure, there was that period of time when I gave thought to being an astronaut, but my complete inability to do more than basic arithmetic and distinct fear of heights quashed that thought before it got very far. Besides, it was the desire to explore new realities that drove my mind there in the first place, something I quickly discovered I could do with art. From then on, my
fate was sealed.
I had terrible asthma as a child, and my overall health was less than stellar. At times, it seemed as though I spent more time stuck in my bedroom or being shuttled back and forth to the emergency room than I did going to school or playing with the kids in my neighborhood. To pass the time, I quickly became an avid reader of science fiction/fantasy novels and comic books. Through them, my imagination was set free.
Even before I could read their contents, I was fascinated by the book covers created by artists such as Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, both of whom created vast worlds of stunning beauty and wonder. Just looking at their renderings, and my mind would run wild with images of dragons soaring over vast cities, and sea creatures dwelling in the dark depths. There were no limits to where my dreams would take me, something I cherished dearly. It wasn’t long before I started trying to draw my own comic books…on anything I could get my hands on. Napkins, notepads, test papers, homework assignments, textbooks; nothing was safe from my pen or pencil.
When I got to highschool, I finally had the opportunity to take my first full art class, and it was there that my teacher, Ms. Ludes, pulled out a magnifying glass, looked at my drawings, and encouraged me to go big. She even talked my parents into buying me my first sketchbooks. To this day, I think they did so more out of concern for their work papers than anything else.
I eventually made it to the Corcoran College of Art and Design with those pencils, but was still unsatisfied with my ability to get my ideas out on paper. Something was missing. I started to get closer to my dream when I transferred into the photography department, but the real world was too…limiting. It was fortunate then that the consumer computer graphics market was just about to explode. One of my classmates brought in a high-end photography magazine, and it happened to feature the still relatively new Photoshop, which was only on version 2.5 at the time. To say my mind was blown would be a gross understatement.
Still being marketed primarily as a photo editing tool, there were already a few artists out there exploring the full boundaries of its capabilities, and I desperately wanted be one of them; enough so that I dropped out of school, took my college fund, and poured it into building my first graphics workstation.
I was fairly impulsive at 17.
Finally, my imagination had the playground I’d spent my entire life up until that point looking for, and I’ve never looked back since.
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