Michèle Griffiths

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Abstract aesthetic 2025

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Michèle’s paintings, as if visual poetry, work on different levels; they hold varying layers of meaning, depending on the mind’s eye of the viewer. She constructs each piece using an experimental process that she has developed over the years, applying a coat of plaster of Paris on a prepared wood panel and, just as it sets, Michèle gives the surface a rough and pitted texture. Once it is dry, she scores random marks, (sgraffito), and then later incises carefully judged, precise lines into the surface.

 

With repeated painting and overpainting, Michèle engages in a dialogue with the messy raw material, aiming to create from it a composition that works aesthetically, embodying balance and harmony. This is a metaphorical way of lending meaning to the random mental and physical scars we all experience in life, to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the marks, like experiences, are erased/forgotten; others defy that process and can never be erased/forgotten.

 

Her work is abstract, but it is also “representational” in that it replicates surfaces of timeworn walls with the imprints of their history, sometimes including old graffiti. Overpainting, with countless, successive, fine layers of acrylic paint speaks of the passing of time and the workings of memory/forgetting. The work is intended to encourage “slow looking” and to withstand the test of time. Michèle invites you to reflect on the interplay of surface and depth, illusion and reality… to appreciate each piece as a physical entity in its own right and, perhaps too, to read into it a deeper meaning; the possibility of what lies behind and beyond it.

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Click images for details and if you are interested in any of Michèle Griffiths' work please enquire below.​​​