Born in New York City in 1959, Max Ferguson started as a filmmaker, making
award-winning animated films as a teenager. But it was while he was a visiting
student at an art school in Amsterdam that his interest shifted to painting. “While
my fellow art students were painting nudes of young women, I was painting
octogenarians with canes.”   "I am not consciously a contrarian, but it would
seem that the louder and larger the work of my contemporaries grows, the
quieter and smaller my paintings become.” 

"My work is essentially autobiographical," says Ferguson, with his two most
frequent models being his father and himself. "The more personal you get, the
more universal you become."   "My paintings are generally populated by a solitary
figure. In one sense it is a soliloquy. But there is someone else involved; the
viewer. So it is more like a dialogue. It is that silent, emotional pas de deux
between the two in which I am most interested."

Ferguson’s paintings are in many prominent private and public collections,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, the Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art, and the soon to open Lucas Museum of
Narrative Art.