Hello,
I'm Michael Barrett.
I’m a Tuesday painter.
This is the end, isn’t ‘it?
When I got started in my career I called myself a _web designer_. I was fresh out of my MFA program and teaching part-time in an Interior Architecture department. I felt closer to design than technology at the time.
David Hockney at the Portland Art Museum
Seeing the David Hockney retrospective at the Portland Art Museum felt personal. His lifelong embrace of technology as an artistic tool mirrors my own scrappy history with photocopiers and inkjet prints, and vindicates every argument I ever had about whether any of it counted as art.
8 Pieces
Highlighting my favorite 8 pieces at the 2026 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial
Brace face
Adventures in adult braces
Watch it
Too many bloops. Too many blips. Not enough juice. Time to retire the Apple Watch for a regular old watch.
Make an app
The story of why and how I made a nostalgic RSS news reader app.
Make a book
Turning a collection of Instagram posts into a handmade book.
90 Notes to Self
A conceptual art photo journal for Instagram
What even is a website?
A short love-letter to INTDEV’s website followed by some thinking about what a website needs to be.
Minimalism Club and some rambling thoughts about AI
Minimalism.club is a silly little conceptual art joke of a website that I released into the world over the weekend. The central premise is that it’s sort of funny that minimalism requires books, a documentary, a podcast, and many YouTube channels. Why not a club too?
About
I grew up in Charlotte, NC. I attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After a brief stint painting murals and working in galleries, I earnd a Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, I began to experiment with web development, digital imaging, and large format printing.
After graduate school, I found my way to the west coast and into a software development career. My greatest expertise is in front-end engineering but I have also worked as a full-stack web developer and web service developerusing Java, C#, and Python. I have worked extensively with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and have worked with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
I prefer VisualStudio Code as my general purpose code editor on macOS. I prefer Procreate on the iPad for painting. I prefer Sketch on macOS for creating icons and graphics for the web. PixelmatorPro is pretty nice too.
Links-n-things
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