KENT MIKALSEN
Kent Mikalsen is a professionally trained visual artist whose multi-dimensional work also includes experience as a designer and concept artist in architecture, visual effects for feature films, animation and entertainment park design. As an educator he has taught in colleges and universities in Florida, Pennsylvania,Massachusetts and New York.
He grew up in NYC and completed his education in Florida, earning an MFA in sculpture from the University of Florida. During graduate school, Kent was considered a rising star. He was selected for prestigious national and regional shows, permanent collections in major museums and received commissions for large outdoor sculptures.
At the height of his promising career as an artist, Kent became disillusioned with his unbridled and unfulfilling personal life. Seeking more meaning, he moved into an ashram for ten years to study yoga, meditation and other transformational practices. This experience had a profound effect on his inner life and his art. His work became a meditation on the nature of non-physical reality. An unresolved dialogue of opposites still remains between his pursuit of the ethereal and the physicality of his paintings and sculpture. This paradox still resides at the core of his work.