michelle paterok

My interest in painting’s capacity to represent subjective experiences is the foundation of my studio practice. My current work in painting is grounded in the following questions: How is space experienced subjectively, and how are these experiences reconstructed in our memories? How might time’s passage be expressed in the static frame of a painting? Finally, what role might painting have to play in addressing the environmental urgencies of the present moment? With these in mind, I use the medium to mine the poetics of small gestures and encounters in daily life.

Through painting, I document my experience of my quotidian surroundings: light through the bedroom window; objects on the kitchen table; the apartment’s resident cat; walks in my neighbourhood. The work begins from observation: I make sketches and drawings onsite, which are abstracted and reinterpreted in the studio through the process of painting. The initial drawing forms the beginning structure of a painting, while the work is completed by working from memory. Through this process, I use painting to explore my perception and memory of an experience, reflecting on and expressing a particular emotional atmosphere. This is where the evocative capacities of colour and gesture—and the intentionality of their execution—become central to the work.

My 2022 MFA thesis project, titled At Dusk, explored the poetics of colour and light in the context of domestic space, informed by philosopher Timothy Morton’s idea that our current historical moment is haunted by an “intrinsically uncanny” sense of unreality. My current project, tentatively titled A Forest, A Field, A Dream, engages with a similar theme with a focus on landscape, based on twilight walks around my neighbourhood and surrounding parks in Southwestern Ontario. Encapsulated by a French expression for twilight, entre chien et loup or between dog and wolf in English, I explore a time of day when lighting conditions are such that one can’t distinguish between a dog and a wolf—between what is familiar and unfamiliar, real and unreal. I am interested in representing subtle shifts of light and value to create a specific atmosphere, focusing on world-building and creating a sense of narrative between individual paintings.