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  Gallery Of Illustrations By Michael Morgenstern - Usa

For twenty years I have been creating original art for magazines, book covers, ipad features and private collections.
I collage and paint digitally when I illustrate, and use various graphic techniques in my work. I’ve been fortunate to receive recognition and awards in my industry.
I illustrate each week for The Economist Magazine's Banyan column, along with other commissioned projects.
You may purchase limited edition and open edition prints of my fine art online at my store.
My path to becoming a visual artist was not the usual one.
I had recently graduated from The Newhouse School of Communications with a degree in Communications, majoring in Film, and had hoped to start my career doing cinematography and film editing.
There was a small medical concern I had to take care of first, some pain I was experiencing in my right arm. When I visited the doctor, x-rays revealed that I had a life-threatening tumor in my upper arm.
I was told that in order to save my life I would have to lose my dominant right arm and hand.
I began making visual art as an exercise to gain dexterity in my left hand.
I would cut photographs from newspapers, first with scissors and then later with an exacto knife, and paste them into compositions.
It was slow going at first, but after a while I was able to manipulate my hand fairly well. My images were black and white, surrealistic personal expressions and narratives.
I called them “knife paintings”. I experimented with high contrast prints of my montages, and fell in love with the results.
At the time I was living in New York City. Manhattan was a hub of creativity, and a very open and forgiving place. You could have four arms and generally not attract that much attention. But now and again somebody would step out of the crowd or hop off a bike and come over to tell their story. I heard war stories, shark stories, stories about tragic accidents. Strangers would lift up their shirts to show me their scars. The city was a good place to heal, a fascinating place to experience life and art.
I earned a Master’s degree in English education at New York University.
I became a teacher and taught English at LaGuardia High School for the Arts (the “Fame” school) and at Stuyvesant High School. For five years I taught literature and creative writing to many talented and enthusiastic students.
I was offered tenure at Stuyvesant. But I was aching to make art full time. My eyes would get lost in the beautiful forms and textures of the city streets, the colors of rusting metal, the lines of fossilized bottle caps and plastic spoons and debris embedded in the black pavement.
The literature that we would discuss in the classroom weighed heavily on my visual imagination, begging to be illustrated.

Gallery