Paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Contemporary paintings inspired by real and imagined places that were part of Eternal Return a solo exhibition at the Scottish Arts Club in April 2024.

Please click on the thumbnails below for details about each painting.

Trickle down, oil painting by Michele Marcoux, A dreamlike view of main street USA, from a gallery inspired by real and imagined places

Caryatids at rest oil painting by Michele Marcoux, young girls on a swing in a landscape of red and green from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

The form does not repeat oil painting by Michele Marcoux, a figure disappears into an interior with a bed and chandelier, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Tender are the ghosts oil painting by Michele Marcoux, ghostly teenage girls take a selfie near a bright yellow house with a pink sky, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Mnemosyne oil diptych by Michele Marcoux, a girl is on the telephone flanked by images from the past, an interior and exterior, ghostly teenage girls take a selfie near a bright yellow house with a pink sky, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Eternal Return oil painting by Michele Marcoux, a winter landscape that is fading in and out, figures in the foreground are disappearing, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

The black hole of cotoneaster oil painting by Michele Marcoux, a figure is appearing from within an exotic looking garden that is green and pink and slightly threatening, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Mnemosyne’s garden, oil painting by Michele Marcoux, from a distance a yellow garden is fading up into a brownish sky, two figures are playing in the garden, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

Hut (A70 Lanarkshire), oil painting by Michele Marcoux a small hut is fragmenting into dots, from a group of paintings inspired by real and imagined places

SUMMARY

2023-24 ETERNAL RETURN is paintings inspired by real and imagined places. Many were made in response to actual locations. These include an Edinburgh tenement garden, Dalry cemetery an overgrown Victorian cemetery near to my tenement in Edinburgh, a hut on the A76 in Lanarkshire. But the paintings are also inspired by imagination – goddesses from a 1970’s Polaroid garden, ghostly teens taking a selfie, small town USA filtered through memories of my favourite novel – Phillip K. Dick’s groundbreaking sci-fi Ubik.

These paintings were exhibited as part of Eternal Return solo exhibition at the Scottish Arts Club in April 2024. Many thanks to the Scottish Arts Club for inviting me to show my work.

DESCRIPTION: paintings from real and imagined places

Painting restructures what I see, how I remember. I often work outdoors where I feel free to experiment, where it is necessary to improvise. I walk with materials to remote countryside, abandoned places, to be surrounded by nature, enveloped by a place with a “past”. In the studio I further develop these paintings experimenting with mark making, inspired by found photographs. I am interested in how material and abstract qualities of paint, colour, and composition, create visual tension. Paintings become contradictions, that fragment and reveal what I choose to remember.

Eternal Return was a solo exhibition at the Scottish Arts Club. The paintings, from real and imagined places, were often begun outdoors in the landscape – an abandoned village in Spain, the mountains of Italy, disused cottages in Dumfriesshire . In the studio returning to a place of imagination in the studio these works interrogate ideas of memory and displacement, romantic notions of ruin; They are an engagement with a places where personal and collective histories overlap

Eternal Return, painting 2023-24

SUMMARY

DESCRIPTION: paintings from real and imagined places