Mark Royal Schroll and Michael Nagara - Summer Silence
Mark Royal Schroll, American, b.1955
Michael Nagara, American, b.1971
Summer Silence, 2007
Watercolor and acrylic on hollow-core doors, 162 x 25.5 inches
07.010

Alumni Gift

Michael Nagara received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design, in 2003. His bodies of work in painting, calligraphic design, and 3D-generated digital landscape imagery explore traditional nature-oriented East Asian aesthetics and contemporary observations on the environment. After an environmental quiet period from 2000 to 2007, Michael Nagara re-emerged with exoteric environmental work with awareness of the crisis in global climate change.

Mark Royall Schroll is a self-taught painter who constantly seeks the artist within. Born and raised in Beardstown, a small farm town in central Illinois, he has always felt the need to represent his rural background. “I have progressed from viewing the mid-west through rose-colored glasses to seeing the influences of the ag-industry upon our land and the farming culture. It has been a long and sometimes frustrating path, and now I understand what many men of wisdom have said is true… the more I learn, the more ignorant I realize I am.” - M. Royal Schroll
Summer Silence is the first of a new body of work, and is a collaboration between the two artists. The piece seeks to visualize how a 6-ft.-from-ground-level waterline, like that eventually predicted for some coastal cities, might look if manifested in the agricultural Midwest.