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Writer's pictureMichèle Atkinson

COVID CONFINEMENT OPENS A DOOR TO CREATING A NEW BODY OF WORK


I showed up in my studio almost everyday throughout the ups and down of Covid in 2021. Consistently working on a body of work for a whole year is something I had never done before. My curiosity about family ancestry and memory brought me to explore the concept of absence of presence in our lives and became my artwork's central theme. I started by creating narratives inspired by old family photos but enlarged the spectrum as further reflection unearthed various subtle expressions of absence of presence.




My theme is becoming an integral part of my creative process, a feeling I nurture as I work in an attempt to access the indefinable.









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I am a Canadian expressive figurative painter originally from Quebec City.  I studied drawing and painting at the Visual Art Centre in Montreal and over the years followed numerous workshops with local and international artists. I added encaustic image transfers to my practice and started doing clay sculptures during  stays in Mexico. 

The faces and figures I paint are vectors to blurred impressions, memories and feelings I aim at rendering in an imagined world.  Gestural mark-making and an intuitive sense of colour result in painterly surfaces where fragile beings take form in a mode of expressive figuration.  

As I continue working with this series I discover new ways of expressing occurrences of absence that never cease to touch me. 

I work daily in my studio in Montreal where I live, except during summer months where I paint in Vermont in the garage I transformed into an open air studio.

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