Inscape - Abstract Painting Series That Explores the Inner and Outer Landscape. Drawing Upon Memories of East Anglia and Sussex
The Inscape series (2015 onwards) developed out of visits to East Anglia, drawing upon memories harking back to childhood - a time living under vast skies, surrounded by the horizon lines of a flat landscape.
All of Michelle’s family come from East Anglia, including ancestors as far back as she can trace. Since early 1700s, they have been based within a few miles of each other, in the flatlands where the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire meet. This series is an exploration of both inner and outer terrain. It explores fictionalised memories and wistful nostalgia to create calm, meditative, abstract landscape paintings.
Fen is one of the first of this series and Michelle’s interpretation of how it feels to be deep in that territory, surrounded by huge ditches either side of every road, black-earth fields beyond, and big, big skies.
Green Earth III was also inspired by a visit to the Fens, a flat landscape near to the village where Michelle grew up. This is a place of vast, empty fields and huge horizons.
With Zen Landscape, Michelle was intentionally creating a visual haiku - paring down the view to its bare bones. This painting is Zen in the sense of ‘just the essence, this is enough’.
Heath was inspired by a field on the South Downs near to where she lives, where a small cluster of trees is surrounded by bright, yellow crops in the springtime.
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“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places - retreated to most often when we are most remote from them - are among the most important landscapes we possess.”
— Robert MacFarlane, ‘The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot’
October, acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 100cm. £1850
Fen, acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 102cm. Contact Hayden Gallery
Terrain, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 50cm. £795
Clay, acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 102cm.
Ancestral Land, oil on canvas, 40cm x 102cm. £1250
Zen Landscape, oil on canvas, 80cm x 60cm. SOLD
Inlet, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 50cm. £695
Wetland, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 50cm. £695
Heath, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 50cm. £695
Peat II, acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 102cm. SOLD
Hedge, oil on canvas, 80cm x 80cm. SOLD
Flatland, acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 102cm. SOLD
Indian Summer, oil & acrylic on canvas, 80cm x 80cm SOLD
Lowland, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 50cm. SOLD
August, oil & acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 100cm. SOLD
Afterglow, acrylic on canvas, 80cm x 80cm. SOLD
Green Earth III, oil on canvas, 80cm x 80cm. SOLD
Latitude, oil & acrylic on canvas, 80cm x 80cm. SOLD