While some artists choose to have a studio, Michael Stasinos has chosen the city of Seattle – and many vantage points across Capitol Hill — to be his studio.

If you’ve ever walked around Broadway, Pine, Pike, or Boren and seen a painter painting, you might have seen Stasinos at work.

“​​What I’m creating, I think, is an illusion of a moment of time,” Stasinos said. “But it’s made up of so many thousands of moments of time, of observation and documenting that observation.”

Stasinos views his work as a form of storytelling by portraying the lived realities of the people and the city. By documenting how the city has evolved over time, he considers himself to be a visual anthropologist.

When choosing a location, Stasinos look for a place that is ironic, interesting, or a challenge. However, he believes that no matter where you are, there’s something interesting to paint and often finds himself painting until he finds the personality of that space.

“If you stick me at one spot on Capitol Hill, if I just turn my head in different directions, I believe I have at least four if not 20 paintings that I could make.”

As an observer, he enjoys capturing details that people may miss such as signs on the street, trash in the gutter, or graffiti on a building. “That’s kind of where I get jazzed up is when I’m looking at the city and how it’s being treated or evolving,” Stasinos said.

In the past, Stasinos has tried to go to exclusive viewpoints but has been chased out by security even when he has been on the sidewalk. However, he has found that the best stories come from public locations that are accessible to everyone because they represent the daily lives of people.

His “studio” has faced quite a lot of changes in recent years. Stasinos often finds capturing these changes as meditative experience. In Capitol Hill, his paintings often encapsulate the tension between old, much-loved buildings being taken down and larger new buildings with housing and new businesses being built.

“I’m there to document until the painting tells me that it’s been documented,” Stasinos said. “So in a way the painting is an interpretation, because I’m not capturing a moment, I’m capturing really, this evolution.”

Some paintings can take a couple months to finish depending on the weather while some of his more ambitious work can take a couple years to complete.

Originally intending to be an actor, Stasinos took an art class to try to get an easy A but ended up failing.

“The irony of it is that the instructor gave me an opportunity to make up the work and when I made up the work I turned in the work kind of as a portfolio and the art department offered me a scholarship,” Stasinos said.

He continued pursuing art during his undergrad and eventually completed a master of fine arts program at the New York Academy of Art. He also ended up with a lot of student debt.

“I had no money to pay models or to have a studio,” Stasinos said. “And so really my solution for it was, I was just gonna go out on the sidewalk and start doing landscape painting.”

When he first moved to Capitol Hill, he saw the neighborhood as a big melting pot with different communities such as grunge, LGBTQ+, and diversity coming together. This aspect is what has drawn him to stay in Seattle.

While he was trying to paint the cheapest way possible when he first chose to begin painting outside, he still works there even as his reputation has grown. “I just kind of consider the sidewalk my studio,” Stasinos said.

You can find Michael Stasinos working anywhere you can find a view of the city — especially views on Capitol Hill. Learn more at michaelstasinos.com.

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