Michael Garaway (b. 1957, Bristol) is a British artist living and working in Reading, UK. His drawings and paintings, often of an intimately small scale, are sensitively composed using graphical processes, and embody a quiet witness to the continuing evolution of contemporary urban landscapes and living.

Garaway’s precise and geometrical approach to using watercolour, acrylic, drawing and digital media invites contemplation, to share in accessing and absorbing the “voice” of  spaces that we commonly inhabit and pass through.

By pursuing a distinctive combination of grid work, dimensioning, placement and styling of visual elements, his practice has resulted in a unique and identifiable visual language. This has largely been driven by a consistent use of various dimensions typically found in the credit card format, a ubiquitous and common object of contemporary life. Thus the carefully drawn out grids which underly Garaway’s compositions are based on scales subdivided from the height of a credit card data stripe, 12 millimetres.

The precise and hard edged appearance of his forms leads some to assume that they are looking at mechanical or digital prints when viewing his work, while in fact it is most often rendered by hand, using templates, ruling pens and drawing instruments. The typical approach of layering flat shapes in acrylic over watercolour grounds enables a dialogue of surfaces and spatial suggestions to occur within the work, with additional notes of detail placed to further punctuate the composition. 

Following observation and photography of real locations, architectural and environmental features  become transmuted, almost into ciphers, by a process of reduction and simplification that aims to arrive at a settled composition.