Michael Sawyer was born in a small town in British Columbia in 1942. His father, a carpenter, trained his two sons in the building craft and they both became skilled woodworkers. Michael enjoyed drawing as a child, but never considered a career as an artist and has never studied art. In the 1970’s he began an intense period of painting in watercolor, using brushes with only a few hairs, with which he created intricate mandalas influenced by his experience with psychedelics.
In 1973 he received a Canadian Art Council Award based on just two paintings, Sky Wheel and Ascending the Mountain. During the year he received the grant, Michael went to study briefly at the San Francisco Zen Center. After returning to Canada, he completed three paintings: White Tara, Cosmic Silence and Lohan. Two years later, he moved to the Zen Center, where he still resides. During the first ten years of living at Zen Center, Michael ceased painting, having neither time nor inclination.
At Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, where Michael spent three years as a monk, he built the altar for the meditation hall on which sits a third century stone Gandhara Buddha. Returning to San Francisco, Michael worked as one of the managers of Greens restaurant, which had been built and run by Zen Center students. Michael was one of the carpenters who built the restaurant. Michael was ordained as a Zen priest in 1998.
In 1985 Michael was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He began to paint again. The meticulous, painstaking style, in which it would take one or two years to complete a painting, gave way to a larger format and more rapid completion of paintings. Slowly deteriorating eyesight and diminished brush control resulted in new techniques not present in the early, precise paintings. Ocean Samadhi, painted in 1986, is the beginning of a cycle of Buddha images which have a distinctly Western expression.
During the past ten years, Michael’s work has become even bolder and in some cases more whimsical. In Carefully Listen, Michael has painted a portrait of Shunyru Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, looking down upon chimpanzees, one of whom is playing the clarinet. This painting was inspired by street musicians and is an visual imagining of our spiritual life. As Michael’s disease has progressed, the Buddha figures have become even less symmetrical yet the images maintain a power and presence due to Michael’s passion to express his inner world and vision.
Michael continues to live at Green Gulch Farm and is now in hospice care. His last drawing was in March of this year, a portrait of his nurse.
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