Michael Harris is an oil painter, song-writer and world traveller from Toronto. Michael is self taught, having never sought out formal training in art. "Even as a child, I  always preferred to be self-directed, progressing through exploration, experiment and self-discovery - rather than being instructed. It is a sentiment that has remained with me to this day. Needless to say, the appeal of art college was more or less lost on me."   Following high school, Michael made an attempt at compromise by studying graphic design at George Brown College in Toronto. Not surprisingly, he soon became disenchanted with this choice.  The immediacy of travel as a form of self-education better suited his temperament; not to mention his desire for knowledge of life and the world. Seven months of immersing himself in the galleries and culture of Europe at 19 was followed by a year long stay in Australia at 21. At 24, to mark his transition to the ranks of professional artist, Michael took his paints and palette on his year long "trip around the world" - painting his way through Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia, Nepal, India, Greece, Turkey and the UK.   Michael has spent years developing and evolving his approach to painting in oils. His work tends to fall into two general streams - enigmatic, provocative figure paintings of his Crucified Mountie and Tower Of People series; and his haunting and atmospheric landscape paintings which have been consistently sought after by top designers and art enthusiasts in Toronto for several years now. All of Michael's work is deeply influenced by his interest in Buddhism, meditation, psychology, consciousness studies, politics, and the Integral Philosophy of Ken Wilber.   "I think we need to get back to taking painting seriously and strip it of this self-consciously ironic stance that has infected contemporary art for so long. Painting should not be emulating the shallowness of popular mass culture. It should be the antidote to it."   "The nature of painting is unique in that it captures not only the  conceptual originality of the individual painter's mind, but also the moment to moment flicker and flow of pure creative inspiration itself. Each brush stroke, each colour selection is a single moment; a flash of an individual's being that is held in place for all time. Painting therefore has this mysterious ability to transcend the boundaries between people over vast stretches of time. In an era where so much of human interaction is mediated by impersonal electronic technologies, the power to transcend the boundaries that separate individual human hearts and to plug-in directly to one another's souls suggests to me that painting in the 21st century should be more vital than ever."