Savannah-based interdisciplinary Artist Michael Porten’s Enjoy Yourself is a series of oil paintings of flowers first rendered realistically in an alla prima style and then deliberately blurred with a large brush. This final gesture disrupts the clarity of the image, pulling it into a space between presence and disappearance.
The paintings began during Michael’s first year as a father. “That year was difficult and filled with intense growth—bearing witness to everything new for my son: all of the good, beautiful, and frightening,” he says. “It was also marked by the strange distortion of time that accompanies a steady stream of swollen moments. Days and months seemed to collapse into one another.” The smeared surfaces of the paintings echo this sensation—the way memory, forgetting, and time blur together when life suddenly feels both fuller and more fragile.
During that same year, Michael also lost his father. “The paintings carry a quiet memento mori within them,” he explains. “The blur is not meant to obscure the image so much as to acknowledge the instability of the moment—an awareness that beauty, youth, and even the ordinary days we inhabit are always in motion.”
The title of the series, Enjoy Yourself, comes from a song by Guy Lombardo. The paintings hold something of the tune’s buoyant sentiment, even as they confront the passage of time. The gesture of the blur—after Gerhard Richter—also acknowledges the painter who famously employed it, sometimes simply “to make a good picture.” Ultimately, these works serve as quiet reminders to pay attention and to appreciate the fleeting brightness of the present moment.
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 3," oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 25," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 30," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 28," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 2," oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 1," oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 34," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 35," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 31," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 37," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 33," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 32," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 36," oil on canvas, 12 by 12 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 27," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 26," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
"Enjoy Yourself, After Richter 29," oil on canvas, 24 by 24 inches
Michael Porten is an interdisciplinary artist based in Savannah, Georgia, where he received a BFA in illustration & an MFA in painting from The Savannah College of Art & Design. His inspiration is often drawn from contemporary pop culture and iconography, focusing on “the synchronicity of seemingly disparate content and contexts,” and his points of reference range from Vonnegut to Voltaire. Michael's work is about exhausting the possible. His process consists of taking an idea and exploring its variations & combinations in sketches & on his computer, then pushing it through as many physical, painted, printed or sculpted variations as necessary until it reaches a state of maximum aesthetic density. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Toronto, Hong Kong, and France. His projects have been featured in New American Paintings, Oxford American, and Metropolis (online), as well as by VH1, New Balance, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
AVAILABLE WORKS