As a child raised in the flatlands of Illinois, J. Michael Simpson would often explore the nearby woods and fields. Only after two graduate degrees and years teaching art did Simpson realize that his search for artistic identity was embedded in those moments of childhood curiosity and discovery. It happened to him while painting a small whitewater river in the Colorado Rockies, a “for real” Sublime moment. He was awed by the simultaneous and intricate race of uncountable waves, ripples, and swells that crashed past his gaze; a vision he associated with the flow of events in life through time. As metaphorical content whitewater rivers offered great possibility, but as a subject the river was never still enough to paint. Using photography and later video editing he learned to transcribe the roiling water into intense marks of color in works that interlace traditional media with contemporary technologies (video, GPS data, time stamps, and digital silkscreen). He states, “I want to metaphorically bridge rivers as a force of nature with a contemporary sense of the human spirit.”
While teaching at Auburn University, Simpson’s work was acknowledged with an “Alabama State Grant in Painting.” He went on to teach at Eastern Michigan University, Winthrop University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In 2005, Simpson was invited to a residency at the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. While there, he was loaned a digital video camera he used to record the whitewater movement of a river in western South Carolina.