About

Mike Chearney is a self taught…

… American painter, inspired by the creative freedom of his early Baltimore childhood, he is known for his energetic abstract portraits.   A second career fine artist, Chearney fuses his Madison Avenue advertising background with his deep meditation and mindfulness practice and his love of organic living.  Mr. Chearney loves Los Angeles and has lived and worked there since beginning his professional painting career in 2005. He believes his art transmits its own positively charged energy vibration through channeled color frequencies specific to his subject, in effect aspiring to create an uplifting portrait of the subject’s soul or best self.  Pioneering a new way of looking at a person, place, or thing, Chearney’s work explores the ability of art to transmit a tangible and measurable energetic signature.  

In 2015, a turning point in Chearney’s work, his portrait of iconic art patron Joan Quinn, was the featured work in a Cornell Museum retrospective featuring portraits by Basquiat, Moses, Gehry, Graham and more.  In a Gadsden Arts Center Museum exhibition in 2016, Chearney achieved a life long dream of being listed in a catalogue next to his first inspiration, 

Marc Chagall.  In 2017, he received the Creative Vision Award from the national charity “A Window Between Worlds” for his artistic exploration of large scale energetic healing.  

Living and working outside the lines, there is no separation between the studio, the canvas and the dance of painting as Chearney creates. His is a highly physical and spontaneous intuitive process.  Often building on an organic architecture, it is not unusual to find an embedded rose petal in a Chearney portrait.  Chearney exhibited at Greece’s leading contemporary gallery, The Rarity Gallery, in Mykonos in the Spring and Summers of 2018 and 2019 and he is currently working on new paintings for a Greek Gods Exhibition based on his experiences in Greece and its energy as the birthplace of democracy and the arts.