Interview / Mike Ousley
January 2026
James Barron: You've been working with egg tempera for over a year now. Tell us about your evolution with tempera, and how you're expressing a different aspect of the stories you tell.
Mike Ousley: Egg tempera is a slower painting medium. It's akin to drawing or watercolor, like slowly layering a fine gauze.
I first painted with watercolors in high school. I had a classmate named Chuck Compton, and he could draw anything and also use watercolors. We sort of competed with each other, and I learned to layer in glazes. Egg tempera is just
It first appealed to me when I saw the work of George Tooker and Paul Cadmus. Their paintings have an otherworldly surface quality that must have required a lot of patience. I taught myself from an Altoon Sultan book about egg tempera. I can work inside with it, and the smells don't bother me. Tempera is also permanent. I've read that there are paintings that have lasted nearly a thousand years and haven't even faded.
JB: The tempera paintings are far more prosaic. Do you feel you're able to access a different set of memories?
MO: It's important to show the places that have molded me and six generations of folks in Southeastern Kentucky. These are places that remained in isolation, and that isolation formed a foundational and deeply rooted culture. I grew up in a coal camp in Garrett, Kentucky. Many of my scenes feature the old company houses, shotgun houses, and such. You look at those places and you'll instantly know what High Lonesome means. There is a feeling that has settled all over this place, maybe a residual feeling. My lifelong pursuit is to distill that feeling into paintings.
JB: Are these paintings done from memory, or do you look at photographs while you paint? Or is it a little of both?
MO: My paintings don't look right when I use photographs, which I learned the hard way, although I've collected many pictures. I've also collected a lot of coal scrip and stuff from when my Dad was a miner. We used to drive around to a bunch of those places and stop and talk to people. I was really quiet as a kid, but I listened to stories and took in the visuals. When I run into some of those folks today, they will still say "Hey, there's Jerry's boy."
If you've ever been to a place like Garret or traveled back into old West Garret Holler, you'll see those places are undeniably where Eastern Kentucky folk culture has its roots. I saw quilt making, woodcarving, storytelling, and folk music all in about a mile stretch of old dirt road. I was so lucky to have been a child in the middle of those things. It often felt very lonesome and of course isolated, but those are the kinds of forces that make a diamond, so to speak.
JB: Do you look at American artists like Martin Johnson Heade? He brings a sort of mysticism to his depiction of flowers.
MO: I don't know much about Heade, but his paintings of flowers look amazing.
I think everything is a little mystical to me. It's also about seeing the things that go unnoticed by us in everyday life. I also think egg tempera brings a mystical quality to things. It's slow, reverent work for a person who has great reverence for this region and its people.
JB: Are there historical painters of Appalachia that you admire? Do they influence your work?
MO: As a young adult, I actually met the Charley Kinney/Noah and Hazel. I've met Ronald and Jesse Cooper, Minnie Adkins, and Hugo Sperger. The Mountains of Eastern Kentucky forge many creatives. Just travel down U.S. 23 and see all the country music artists from this area. The Coopers and Charlie Kinney in particular are important influences.
JB: You once mentioned that Bunched Arrowhead is a highly endangered spe-cies, present only in two counties in the world. Do you feel an obligation to be a custodian of Appalachian culture?
MO: Bunched Arrowhead only exists in two counties in the world: one in South Carolina and one in North Carolina. It's an aquatic plant that grows in seepage and run-off from the mountains. You better believe I feel that it's important to take care of Appalachian culture. These people and places have loved me into being. I never really started painting in earnest until later in life, and without my experiences, here I never could have made any of my work. Southeastern Kentucky is a foundational hub for folk culture in America, period. It's a real folk people with a real folk culture. People will travel all over the world looking for cultural things and folklore. I was born and sat right down in the middle of it. I didn't have to travel anywhere.
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JB: The moon appears in your art often. Do you think about the cycles of the moon? Do you see it as a character in its own right?
MO: I ride my bike a lot at night on the trails here. They made some of the old railroads into bike trails. I ride at night, look at the moon, and listen to the hoot owls. One of the first times I started riding at night, it was warm and so bright under the supermoon. You could smell the cedars, spicebush, and honeysuckle.
That was perfection.
JB: People have been painting about the end of times forever. Do you feel an anxiousness about today, and is that reflected in your paintings? Or are these strictly depictions of myth and folklore?
MO: I don't worry about the end of times much. It'll be here when it's ready I don't watch a lot of news, and I never grew up around anyone who talked politics. My depictions come from my mamaw Alice Moore Ousley. She used to take me to the Little Philadelphia Old Regular Baptist Church. They had a unique way of singing in that Church. The Smithsonian Folkways came and did many field recordings of them. They preached apocalyptic things, visions of Hell and Heaven. They had an old preacher named Raymond Lawson. He couldn't read, but he knew every word of the Bible from cassette. They had another preacher named Jerry Case. My mom said he used to preach as a teenager.
He even preached when he was drinking. Later on, he got straightened out.
He baptized just about all the people on my mom's side of the family. I've just started painting some of those things.
My great grandpa Tommy Moore Ousley built that church, and everyone there knew us well. Later down the road I became a layman pastor in the old Methodist Church. Not very many know that. I guess I was a little too rowdy to stick with that.
JB: Some of your paintings are also more joyful, and reference comic book characters like Conan the Barbarian or TV shows like Gilligan's Island. Could you speak a bit to your relationship with pop culture?
MO: It's good to have fun and maybe not always take yourself so seriously. I think the art world, at least as I've seen it, wants everyone to stay in a lane or do one thing all the time. I don't think that's very human. I wouldn't sell my creativity so easily. I guess I'm on the outside of the art world. I've never even been to New York City. Somebody told me you could get a hot dog at 4am, but I could just make one at home all the same.
Born the son of a coal miner in Southeastern Kentucky, Ousley’s paintings are, at first glance, simple stories told in the folk tradition—tight vignettes of a memory, some odd anecdote or an old Appalachian tale. Upon further reflection, they represent a broader struggle of the Appalachian peoples to secure their collective identity via a rich heritage of storytelling.
In popular media, Appalachia suffers from an essentialist narrative that holds the region as one of desolation of mind and spirit. There is an infamous segment of Dan Rather’s 48 Hours from 1988 in which he visits Muddy Gut, a community in Floyd County, Kentucky. Depicting broken-down cars and dilapidated buildings while describing poverty and ignorance, the narrative of the program was one of inability, dependence, and need. People of the region were rightfully inflamed. Not only did 48 Hours generalize their existence, but it was also, in many ways, an affront to their humanity, as the Kentucky governor stated in a later interview. Notably, the program added a banjo to their theme song for the episode, a cue for the viewer signaling that they are entering a place that exists outside of place and time. Though a lot of work has been done by anthropologists focused on the region, this myth of Appalachia persists.
Old enough to have seen the 48 Hours segment on TV, Ousley feels that, “some people look at Appalachia to remind themselves of what they are not.” Ousley tackles these class myths on a heroically mundane scale, setting his stage outside of local bars, high atop mountains, deep in the forest, along nameless rivers and on the shores of shadowed ponds. “I tend to view my paintings as ballads for the rough living found in the Central Appalachian Coal Region [...] a poetry for the underdog.” His canvases are unrelenting; his figures face the world with confidence, taking each moment in stride no matter the situation. They are often haunted by supernatural creatures, many of whom seem just as hardscrabble as the human denizens with which they commingle.
Though trained in academic techniques, Ousley made a conscious choice to return to the style of his youth, feeling it more true to his history and the stories he wanted to tell. For him, it was a matter of pride, and the playfulness of his work belies its serious intent. For example, The Ballad of Omie Wise illustrates a popular 19th century murder ballad, a story of two young lovers from opposite sides of the track that ends in the discovery of a pregnant, drowned body; Back Road Nip Joint depicts a type of illegal, nomadic bar prevalent in the region; and in Last Mountain Man we see a small camera crew interviewing only what one can assume to be the last of his kind.
Myths in ancient civilizations are known only by virtue of the fact that they became part of a written tradition, and many of these more contemporary tales would be lost were it not for the same inclination. Similarly, Ousley records an oral tradition in paint, aligned with the powerful folk tradition he was born into: “Sometimes when family would come in, as many as fifteen might gather in a room and tell stories and drink coffee. I can’t say all paintings should tell a story but for me it’s essential to the practice.” Through his work Ousley seeks to reclaim the Appalachian folk narrative, and position it as one of toughness and resourcefulness, of roots and pride that run deep.
About Mike Ousley
Mike Ousley (American, b. 1976) paints a direct commentary on Appalachian life and folk traditions, though their simplicity belies their depth. Ousley has painted since childhood, and though trained (MFA, University of Cincinnati), he foils Western European traditions with the folk style of his youth. Having grown up in a small coal town in Southeastern Kentucky listening to stories told by friends and family, he credits the visionary artists and rich heritage of the region as his primary influence. Recent exhibitions include Nine Lives at Fortnight Institute, NY; From These Hills at the William King Museum of Art, VA, curated by Michael Rooks; and, Something on the Wind at Morehead State University, Morehead, KY. His work was featured in ArtMaze Magazine Issue 22, selected by Fabiola Alondra and Jane Harmon. Ousley has been a resident at the Huntington Museum of Art, studying with Alfred Leslie; Arc of Appalachia; and, North Mountain. His work can be found in numerous private collections, as well as the public collections of Ashland Community College, Highlands Regional Medical Center, Morehead State University, and Ohio State University.