Michelle Parsons is a UK based oil painter specialising in organic-based paintings and commissions. Her artwork is often based on drawing marine creatures, such as lobsters, fish, and crabs, although she has also branched out to abstract artwork and portraits. Parson's art has been displayed in galleries throughout Essex, Sussex, and London, and she sells her work across the world to private clients, interior designers, and restaurants.
Parsons is influenced by painters like Gerhard Richter and John Piper, and her art brings together loose brushstrokes, striking impasto marks, bold colours, and texture to create vivid and tactile pieces.
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Michelle Parsons is an artist and part time art tutor from Billericay, England. After graduating in 1989 with a BA in Fine Art from Northumbria University, she worked in Israel creating community art and murals, before returning to her native UK in 1992. Parsons then become an art teacher and later Head of Art at Brentwood School in Essex, before deciding to retire in 2016 to focus on painting full time.
Parsons completes much of her work in her self-designed home-cum-studio called Dapple House. Situated in a secluded woodlands near Billericay, the black timber-clad property is so distinctive that it featured on Grand Designs on Channel 4 in 2016. Michelle and her husband David Parsons decided to create the house after Michelle suffered from cancer, with her battle with the disease prompting the couple to realise their dream of living in a house they had designed themselves.
She also runs a ten week art course at the The Fold in her hometown. Initially teaching her students fundamental techniques of drawing and painting, such as line, shading and composition, Parsons then proceeds to educate her students on the more complex colour-mixing and painting application techniques. By the end of the course, her students develop a strong comprehension of the structure, mediums, and approaches used in the 2-dimensional form, as well as the confidence to further hone these skills.
Parsons uses colour, space, texture and light to embellish her work, with her loose brushstroke and blurred backgrounds contrasting with her penchant for sharp detail and tighter representational mark-making. Talking about her art, she stated: "The longer I paint, the more I realise that my work is all about the composition as a whole. My style has an adaptive reverence for the subject and yet does not rely on it-elevating the forms with bright use of colour and mark-making. The resulting pieces are proud declarations of colour and expression."