Artist's Statement:

“All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular.”

- Charles Baudelaire

In his ‘Salon of 1846’ Baudelaire discusses the need for both a transitory and an eternal element to art, a concept I have found very helpful in making sense of the role of painting today. A painting that contains only the transitory elements of its own time will be fleeting and shallow; one that contains only the eternal elements is too static, too removed from the world and from our experience of it. Like poetry, a good painting comes back to you at odd moments and so it is crucial that it exist in the memory as well as in a physical form. A painting created now, if well done, can be a kind of interpreter or mediator between the present and the rich history of artistic tradition. It can invoke the paintings of the past but also tie them to our everyday lives so that we might see in our lives, and in the ordinary things around us, something of the eternal beauty of those past masterpieces.

- Matilda Michell