_{Micheal Gordon}

by Charles Gladden

BELIZE CITY, Tues. Apr. 8, 2025

The work of one of Belize’s most prolific artists, Michael Gordon, was showcased at the Imagination Factri on Tuesday, April 8, in Belize City.

“It takes a try to do it, because I’m only the artist; but then, who wants to build me up?”, said Gordon.

“In the Toward the Michael Gordon Museum project” is the title of the exhibition that showcases hundreds of Gordon’s works, which were created using cardboard, paper, canvas, wood panels, mixed materials, and wood sculpture.

He began his work close to three decades ago.

“I [started] from ’98, but one thing I couldn’t get perfect was the shape of things. The two artists who inspired me were Vanzana and Stryker, [and] that’s what I used to do on Albert Street. So, I put them together. I’m putting myself on be realistic, because I could do cartoons right. Well, I like to be realistic, right? And you have to do a lot, because I know everything you can do is realistic,” he said.

When Amandala visited the Imagination Factri, Gordon was working on several pieces of art by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci from which he drew inspiration.

Gordon’s sculptures will be digitalized by using photogrammetry with the help of the Institute of Archaeology (IA-NICH).

“This is a technique that we’ve been using to document artifacts from the Belize National Collection, usually Maya artifacts or colonial items that we have in our national collection. The reason we’ve been using this is that we want to have a digital record of our artifacts. Over the years, we’ve traditionally been using paper documents to record all the details, but during the pandemic about five years ago, we were trapped in not being able to access materials, getting to offices; and so, one of the ways that we could bypass that is having digital records available online, so that we can easily access information,” said Dr. Melissa Badillo, Director for Institute of Archaeology.

“This is our third project with them [Imagination Factri] documenting different items, in this case some of the wooden sculptures from Mr. Gordon. It takes about 200 or more photos that we capture, and then those are stitched together to make a 3D model of the item. It is a trial and error process because you have to look at the lighting, the glare, all these different things factor into the success of the model being created; but so far, we’ve completed a few of them,” she said.

The digital sculptures can be seen through the Ministry of Education’s 501 Access platform.