Federal Hill resident Michael Weiss paints abstract images and creates stained-glass works. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is now a professor and administrator there. Photo courtesy of Michael Weiss / MICA

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The night before Michael Weiss’s 10th birthday, he found himself in the middle of an existential crisis about aging.

“I was in tears because I was never going to be single digits again,” he said. “The notion of time, the passage of time, the delicacy of life, the fleeting nature of it — it’s been with me since I was that age.”

Now 57, Weiss can laugh about this childhood memory and also reflect on how those early realizations about time have driven his career as a painter.

Weiss, who was born in Baltimore City and raised in Baltimore County, has taught painting for more than 20 years at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he is currently interim associate provost and dean for Undergraduate Studies.

Weiss graduated from the art school’s MFA program in 1996 and spent years teaching as an adjunct for various local universities before returning to teach at his alma mater.

His work has been shown at galleries from New York to Europe, and last fall his studio was open to the public in a Studio Open House event.

Not the career he expected

Weiss wasn’t always set on becoming an artist, though. Despite drawing on any piece of scrap paper he could find as a child and taking some art classes in high school, he went to Dickinson College intending to study political science.

During a freshman-year seminar on “the creative life,” taught by the chair of the art department, he began to consider working as an artist.

He became “interested in trying to create things that promoted an emotional response in a viewer; that pushed people in particular ways,” he remembered.

During the fall semester of his senior year in 1988, Weiss studied abroad in London through a Syracuse University painting program and had a “crystallizing moment” when he realized that he wanted to pursue painting as a career. “It was a great semester for me,” he said. “I worked a ton; I went to museums and galleries.”

He also met his future wife in London, and the two decided to stay behind after the program ended to spend Christmas in the city. Tragically, several of their friends were returning to America for the holiday on Pan Am Flight 103 and died in the terrorist attack over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“It made me feel like I cannot waste the time that I have because you just don’t know,” he said of the bombing. The experience spurred him to channel his grief into making more art.

“We dealt with it on our own [without therapy], and I’m still dealing with it,” he said.

From physics to history

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Weiss’s paintings have become a study in the passage of time.

He describes his artistic process as an “interior dialogue” between himself and the canvas — a sort of call-and-response, where he makes a mark, then follows his intuition on how to build the work from there.

Using a combination of oils and alkyd — a type of synthetic resin — on canvas or wood panels, Weiss builds layer after layer, experimenting with textures and color, until the final painting is complete. Because each piece takes days to dry, he has multiple works under way at once in his studio space.

Weiss has begun applying the same process to stained glass, letting the materials guide him “intuitively, one piece at a time, responding to the work I had done the previous session or a few minutes ago,” he said.

Although his foray into the medium is still in its early stages, he says he’s excited to explore where it takes him.

Weiss works in abstract forms and imbues his paintings with ideas from books on topics ranging from quantum physics to the local history of Baltimore.

Weiss has thought carefully about how our past shapes who we are today. He sees a parallel between that accumulation and the act of painting.

“We are constituted of all of our previous experience. And in a physical way, our bodies are constituted of all the things we ingest — whether it’s food or things in the air or the things that we drink.

“And our body uses those as building blocks in the same way that our conscious mind uses our previous experiences and observations,” he said.

“It’s what makes us each an individual. There is a literal equivalent to the way a painting gets built up, layer by layer, move by move, such that it also becomes an individual. It is a result of that passage of time and that passage of experience and accumulation.”

Watching the city change

Weiss said that living in Baltimore for most of his life, too, is a study in the passage of time. He remembers the 1980 renovation of Harborplace, and how the city has always been on the verge of rebirth, even after all these decades.

Baltimore is “a city that has got beautiful light from all the humidity and the way that the water interacts with it,” Weiss said.

As a longtime resident of the Federal Hill neighborhood, Weiss has witnessed the city’s evolving character. Every morning and evening, he walks his dog through the Inner Harbor, watching the sun rise and set.

His daily ritual presents a perfect artistic metaphor, he said. On his walks, Weiss notices and appreciates the tenacity of nature, he said — “the way that trees grow out of abandoned buildings,” and how weeds sprouting in the cracks in the sidewalk “struggle to survive in this environment.”

That persistence of nature inspires Weiss every day.

To view Weiss’ paintings and stained glass works, visit MichaelWeissArt.com.