ARTIST STATEMENT
When I paint or work with clay I slip into a space that expands between me and what I create. I find myself on a threshold between absence and presence, between memory and perception, in a liminal space where the beings I create live in a fragile state. They become vectors of emotions and impressions dictating the narrative content of my work and inviting the spectator to visit its own narrative.
I develop my visual language with oil paintings, image transfers and clay sculptures. Each medium enriches the creative process. One informs the others. Fragile beings in expressive figuration take form in paintings, hazy faces are born out of drawing transfers into soft encaustic surfaces and clay heads become references by creating new conversations. Infusing each piece with a life of its own is a passion that nourishes me.
ABOUT ME
Michèle Atkinson is a Canadian figurative expressive painter originally from Quebec City. She studied painting and drawing at the Visual Art Centre in Montreal and over the years followed numerous workshops with local and international artists here and abroad. Her work was featured in solo and group exhibitions in Quebec and Ontario galleries as well as in Art Fairs in the United States, England and Hong Kong.
She moved away from the abstract florals of her early career when she turned her attention to drawing faces and the human figure. Old family photos lead her to ponder about the momentum of absence and presence in life and how memory and perception blur reality.
Michèle welcomes the opportunity to share her art and speak about it, be it with the public during exhibitions and Open Studio days, online with high school students, or in conversation with artists groups. She works in her studio at Complexe du Canal Lachine, a patrimonial industrial building in Montréal, and in her garage turned into a plein air studio in Vermont in the summer.