Biography – short version

Michael Giron was born in New Orleans, LA, in 1970. Although recognized for drawing skills since childhood, he began formal training in college, graduating with a BFA from the University of New Orleans. He went on to study and teach as a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he received his MFA.  There he met his wife, Nicole, and began a family with two children, Rhianna and Noah. They moved to Omaha in 2000 to remodel his wife’s childhood home.

Mike has been teaching drawing and design, life drawing, and illustration for graphic design at Metropolitan Community College, as well as, painting, mural painting, printmaking, art appreciation and such at Bellevue University, where he is also gallery director.

 

 

 

I have a few names: Michael or Mike Giron, Miguel Girón, and m.girón.

I grew up in New Orleans from 1970-1994 – all in the same duplex my parents had come to settle in after their flight from Cuba in 1962.  As a child, I was often recognized for having strong drawing skills and visual imagination.

I began painting in 1989 as a reckless freshman at Louisiana State University.  My instructor pulled me aside one day and told me he was doing me a favor – he’d “give” me a “D”!  Thank you, Wood Grigsby, you did me a great favor.  I went back home, after loosing my scholarship, and worked summers to help pay my tuition as I returned to earnest study at the University of New Orleans, principally under the mentorship of painter, Jim Richard.  I was very productive there, with my paintings moving through realism into abstraction and process-driven non-representation.  For a while, I smashed into my wooden painting substrates with a stone, lit them ablaze with gasoline and then painted upon the richly textured surface.  Jim referred me for a job painting for Royal Artists, a Mardi Gras float manufacturer, for which I painted cartoony and sometimes elegant scenes and designs for three carnival seasons.

I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1994 to attend graduate school at the University.  It was there I began teaching, studying human anatomy and producing a large volume of work including freestanding, folding screens, murals, more large paintings, etchings and assemblage paintings.  It was also there that I met my lovely wife, Nicole, and began our family.  We moved into a cottage in the mountain town of Jamestown and I began working as a house painter.

Throughout my academic experience and afterwards, I tended towards the psychological, spiritual and mythological, usually rooted in personal experience, but often reflecting my perceptions of our society at-large. 

After our move to Omaha in 2000 to remodel Nicole’s childhood home, my work slowed down a bit.  I started weaning from house painting and began teaching art studio courses at Metropolitan Community College and then at Bellevue University.  Among the classes I teach or have taught are: drawing and design, life drawing, illustration for graphic design, painting, mural painting, printmaking and art appreciation.  I am also director of the gallery at Bellevue University, for which I have been developing more content-driven exhibits and events to stimulate public dialogue.  I also took on the task, with a group of veteran prinmakers, of moving BU’s former printmaking studio to the Hot Shops to begin the Omaha Printmaker’s’ Guild, which you can find in Hot Shop’s link in the sidebar.

In 2007, I began on a new path of renewed growth as an artist and as a person.  Along with a building flow of creativity came the desire to learn my parent’s native tongue, Spanish, and the letting go of beliefs and attitudes that no longer fit and kept me from manifesting my true self.  For this, I am most grateful.  Through art and relationships, I have experienced the transformative and the transcendent.  The artwork you will see in my portfolio is, to me, a sometimes unexpected means of awareness of what is often described as the mystery of life.