Michele Baron | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Born in 1952 in Ferryville, a small industrial town in northern Tunisia, Michele moved to France at the age of 8. Already drawing in a notebook that she took to school, she brought a little character to life, much like a cartoon. Endowed with a vivid imagination, she decided to attend drawing, painting and sculpture classes at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and then began her training as a stylist at the Duperre School of Applied Arts in Paris. Her diplomas opened the doors of studios along Rue Royale in Lyon where she worked as a graphic designer in textile design, silk painting and “hand painting”. She then spent two years in Morocco to learn carpet making. Upon her return to France, she moved to Lyon where she worked for more than 20 years in children's publishing. Her passion for painting never left her and to her delight, Michele would work only on her painting from then on. Her paintings are small pieces of life in which the body, the nude, and the portrait still occupy a central place. ""Life! This is the largest collection of ideas on the planet!"" she says. Faces and silhouettes in motion fascinate the artist. She loves to capture the energy, and translate the emotions into poetry. Preferring colours to words, Michele tells us tales full of life, depicting her happiness, her conflicts, her exiled childhood or her joy in being a woman. Women are the artist’s favourite subject: she likes to stand up for them, representing and reflecting the ambivalence of their femininity, between strength and fragility. Joyful, angry, nasty, fierce and proud, Michele paints women in all her forms, in a lush and bold way, both full of wisdom and humour. She seeks above all to cause a reaction in the viewer. Her painting touches and moves us, sometimes shocking and pushing us to change our outlook and broaden our horizons. Behind the freshness and lightness of her works lies painstaking work. The artist creates a sketch with spontaneous strokes in front of a live model and then organizes and balances her composition in acrylic when back in her studio. Thus the canvas enters into movement: the charcoal lines give life to the characters and colour animates them, giving us a magical cure for sadness.