Beer With a Painter: Michael Berryhill

"ELLENVILLE, New York - The word "GUILLOTINE" was drawn in charcoal capital letters on the wall of artist Michael Berryhill's basement studio when I visited him in November, shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Berryhill was fired up about the state of the country but optimistic. His home is a museum piece of the 1950s, with plywood floors, ranch-style corner windows, and pink-tiled and wallpapered bathrooms."

"Berryhill's painting, too, enacts its own form of resistance. Although his is a vibrant palette of pinks, oranges, blues, and yellows, it's also trippy and electric, especially under the fluorescent tube lighting he prefers. It's too passionate for a Garden of Eden and more aligned with the unsettling nature of Philip Guston's pinks. And while his paintings are generous and luscious, he always favors a dry brush - drawing into the weave of the linen canvas and using it as resistance,"

Michael Berryhill's Catskills home studio features the word 'GUILLOTINE' drawn in charcoal on a basement wall, reflecting political fervor and optimism. The 1950s house functions as living, music, and performance spaces alongside painting and recording studios. The upstairs living room is filled with colorful mid-century furniture and patterned accents. Berryhill's paintings use a vibrant palette of pinks, oranges, blues, and yellows and become trippy and electric under fluorescent lighting. He favors dry-brush work that draws into linen and scrapes away paint, simultaneously forming and resisting images; some canvases depict animals, figures, tabletops, and suns, while others avoid clear figuration. Born in El Paso in 1972, he holds a BFA from UT Austin and attended Skowhegan before completing an MFA at Columbia.

Read at Hyperallergic