Michael Fairclough is a contemporary British painter and printmaker. He has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad and his oil paintings and colour aquatints are in many public, corporate and private collections around the world. Michael Fairclough was commissioned to design a set of National Trust stamps for the Post Office in 1981 and his commission of five large canvasses for the boardroom of the new Meteorological Office in Exeter is probably his most important so far. He is a regular exhibitor at The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibitions and the 50th of his works to be shown there was exhibited in the 2016 exhibition.
Michael Fairclough's work has always been characterized by a strong abstract structure underpinning a sense of space and informed by acutely observed meteorological events - perhaps not surprisingly he is also a glider pilot.
"Michael Fairclough's paintings are, in the true sense of the word, awesome. The huge skies filled with strong sunlight and the cold, powerful seas that form the foreground of his highly atmospheric images transmit to the viewer the vastness of the heavens and the remoteness of the locations that Fairclough tends to frequent."
Ian Courcoux