Remembered places, layered and remade

Michael Draghi is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His paintings explore how places are held, altered, and revisited through memory, drawing on the landscapes and everyday environments of Los Angeles and California. Water, vegetation, sky, and traces of the built environment emerge from layered color, then dissolve back into marks. Faint figures and familiar forms move through these spaces without resolving into a single story, suggesting how people and experiences become bound to a place. His compositions bring different moments together within one image, allowing remembered landscapes to shift between recognition and abstraction.

Working with tools and materials connected to his life, Draghi uses sea sponges and a surf wax comb to shape the painted surface, caulking guns to dispense paint, and fiberglass cloth and fragments of paint formed on non stick foil to build additional layers. These methods create surfaces that feel accumulated rather than fixed, with each application leaving traces of what came before. Natural and constructed forms overlap, neither fully obscuring the other. A landscape comes into view, breaks apart, and returns, less as a record of one location than as an experience of living with its many versions.