About Mike
Mike Notarfrancesco has been drawing ever since he could pick up a crayon. The New-Jersey-based pen & ink artist always enjoyed tapping into his creativity in one form or another.
He loved his coloring books as a kid, learned how to actually paint and draw in middle school, and even played around with power tools in his high school woodworking classes.
He pursued Civil Engineering in college, and he had the opportunity to minor in Architecture. It may have been during these Minor classes when he first learned about a beautiful mathematical principle found in nature, called the golden ratio.
The more he learned about the golden ratio, the more he was captivated by it. Call it the best of both the technical and the creative worlds, this geometric pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence is without a doubt, the signature left by God within all of nature.
It’s what human beings have used to create beautiful art, harmonious music, and stunning architecture for millenia.
After graduating with his degree, he spent a few years working as an engineer in the consulting world. He realized this was not the career meant for him and he quit his job to travel the world.
He went where the wind took him, and luckily he brought his sketchbook along for the ride. It was during this 6-month journey through Italy, Thailand, and Japan that Mike found his love for art again.
Traveling with a few Micron pens, a set of drafting pencils, and his sketchbook, he spent a lot of time practicing his drawing techniques, including a specific form of shading tiny dots called stippling.
His skills developed along the way, from making quick graphite sketches in the shadow of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, to ink drawings of ancient serpent statues in Chiang Mai, to finally adding gold paint he purchased in Tokyo.
Through all of this practice, Mike has been able to develop his unique drawing style, successfully combining fine lines, stipple shading, and a “touch of gold” that makes his artwork truly stand out.
Combining gold paint and the golden ratio has become a staple of all of his artwork, and he hopes the aesthetics of this combination refresh admirers’ curiosity as it has with his, leading them to see the patterns of the world in a new light.
Since returning to the United States, he’s created numerous pieces of both original and commissioned artwork that have found new homes all across the world.