MichaelLaughrin.com

Michael Laughrin is a modern Renaissance Man, versed in many of the arts. He believes that music, poetry, and the visual arts are all, at the deepest level, limbs of the same great tree of human creative expression.

His journey into the arts started at the age of 11 with music: cello lessons. Then between the ages of 13 and 18, he also attended music school, learning to play the French horn. At age 15, he taught himself to play the guitar, mostly folk style. In college, he changed his major from physics to music for a couple of years, learning classical guitar. After learning the theory and techniques of music, he began to improvise, going beyond classical “rules”. He also later took jazz guitar lessons, which strengthened his ability to improvise.

His journey into the arts continued much later at age 42 when he took a poetry writing class with author Diane Frank. This served to teach him how to, not only access the inner field of infinite creativity, but to also bring it out in manifest form. This led to the creation of many poems and 2 books.

His journey in the visual arts: He studied art at age 25 at the Karamu House in Cleveland, but then took a long break, so to say. He came to abstract art and painting rather recently in 2012, studying with artist Judith B. LaMar. Her teaching and influence have been seminal in helping him express art in visual form. He feels that the ability to do abstract art and the ability to improvise in music are closely connected.

Michael has been meditating regularly since 1968. He believes that this has helped him access the deep, inner filed of Creativity within more than anything else. He strongly feels that meditation is most important in his life, and in his art, because it teaches us, experientially, to expand our consciousness to previously unimagined levels.