Hello,
I'm Michael Barrett.
3 parts gin to one part vermouth.
Recent Artwork

These halves of an avocado fit together but don’t quite match.
- Dimensions
- 24ʺ ✕ 36ʺ
- Media
- Acrylic, inkjet, and mixed media on canvas mounted on wood panel
Writing
At Substack, I write semi-regularly about current art projects, travel, and thing
The road to Machu Picchu
Chinchero, Moray, the Sacred Valley
Two nights in Cusco
Gasping for air in the thousand-year-old Inca capital.
Three nights in the Amazon Rainforest
Time stops on the riverside.
Day 2 in Lima
Are hats illegal here?
First full day in Lima
Our connecting flight from Atlanta touched down softly. The immigration line was a breeze and our bags popped up on the baggage carousel quickly. The men’s restrooms were an ecological disaster. I decided to wait. An on-the-ground employee of our travel agency was outside of immigration to meet us. It never gets old seeing someone holding a sign with your name on it at the airport. I think we should greet all of our family and loved ones this way.
Business party
The mullet theory of work / life balance
Poodle thoughts
My beloved poodle’s world seems to be shrinking. He had a bought of kennel cough recently. I learned that kennel cough is basically the same as a “cold” - it’s one of many possible respiratory things. Usually antibiotics clear it up. It took about three weeks for the cough to clear up. While he was actively sick he was disinterested in long walks. Fair. No one wants to work out when sick.
A new coat of pixels
Thinking technically, minimally
Notes on the approaching darkness
Foreboding winter
Suddenly St. Louis
From here, it’s the gateway to the east.
Notes on an app
Software is made of compromises
New work: May December
The avocado is a metaphor.
New work: 11am Continental
Iconic clouds over the Pacific City coast
Business art: the art of performing business
On Blake Gopnik’s Warhol
Studio sale
Making room for more art
Memories of Ireland, England, and Spain
An old travel journal from 2019
Saturday art walk
Visiting Froelick, Augen, Nucleus, Talon and Antler on a sunny Saturday
Seattle Art Fair
Overnight in Needle Town
About
I grew up in Charlotte, NC. I attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After a brief stint painting murals and working in galleries, I earnd a Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, I began to experiment with web development, digital imaging, and large format printing.
After graduate school, I found my way to the west coast and into a software development career. My greatest expertise is in front-end engineering but I have also worked as a full-stack web developer and web service developerusing Java, C#, and Python. I have worked extensively with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and have worked with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
I prefer VisualStudio Code as my general purpose code editor on macOS. I prefer Procreate on the iPad for painting. I prefer Sketch on macOS for creating icons and graphics for the web. PixelmatorPro is pretty nice too.