Michael von Helms is an American abstract expressionist painter whose career began in his forties after twenty-five years as a working photographer, a late but intensely committed turn to painting that produced more than three decades of large-scale, layered, gesturally worked canvases rooted in the postwar tradition of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell.
Michael von Helms (born 1939, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) is an American painter working in the tradition of non-figurative Abstract Expressionism. After his family's move to Santa Fe in the years following the Second World War, he was educated at Colorado College, Stanford University, and the University of Colorado Extension, and worked as a professional photographer for some twenty-five years before turning to painting in his forties. He painted in Santa Fe for nearly three decades and now lives and works in Houston, Texas.
His painting belongs to the gestural and biomorphic line of Abstract Expressionism associated with Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Picasso, and his mature canvases are characterized by repeated layering, he has been known to repaint a single canvas as many as five times, that gives the surfaces a thick-and-thin density and a palpable sense of edge and energy. His earlier work of the 1980s was marked by simpler, dramatically composed petroglyph-like imagery; through the 1990s the work became more sophisticated, color-saturated, and energetically composed. He was included in the seminal 1986 Fresh Paint exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and has continued to exhibit through galleries in the Southwest and Texas.