A studio visit with Michelle Paterok
Gentle paintings of verbs
This article is part of an ongoing series titled Studio Visits. To view past visits, click here.
I didn’t have many plans for my weekend in Montreal last month, but I did know I wanted to visit Michelle Paterok’s studio. Her paintings have the suggestion of atmosphere, of time and place, through a gentleness I’m not used to with the medium. There’s a distinct absence of paint strokes—that typical signature of an artist’s presence. Instead, Paterok engulfs the paintings with pigment, allowing the paint to seep into the canvas.
There’s a stillness to these paintings, achieved through process. Layered transparencies and gently competing colours depict the quiet moments of life. A drive through a snowy road in Newfoundland (you can almost hear the silence!), a moment sitting at a kitchen table with a naturally formed still life in front of you, looking up at the sky at night. The paintings don’t depict nouns; they’re verbs. Paterok paints what it feels like to move through life.
Here’s how Paterok describes her painting practice:
My interest in painting’s capacity to represent subjective experiences is the foundation of my studio practice. My current work 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.
Paterok is currently showing at Future Fair 2025, booth E2, with Duran Contemporain. If you’re in New York for the fairs, you really should go and visit.
Beautiful words as always, one of my favorites !