Square Slate Dog Portraits

Michael Updike graduated from Mass College of Art and received his MFA from Vermont College. He is a long standing North Shore artist. Trained as a sculptor, he recently began creating artistic personalized memorial stones as well as unique slate carvings. His work challenges the pictorial paradigms of additive imaging.”I honed my carving skills on old slate roof shingles which then became my primary medium. I use slate with outward signs of wear. Paint, tar, nail holes, fractures, chips and flaking tell of the slate’s former utilitarian life. The scars of its history rest on its surface while I cut through the patina revealing fresher layers of stone.