‘I am out with lanterns, looking for myself’ Emily Dickinson, letter to a friend, 1855

The cryptic paintings of Miss Michelle Brodie

I’ve known Michelle Brodie since my late teens, which is to say that I’ve known her work for a long time: Michelle is so intertwined with what she creates, and what she makes is so important to her, that it’s not possible to think of her and not think of her paintings. 

This is a piece of writing for a show, but it’s also a kind of love letter to my friend of so many years, and to her work. In it I have quoted Michelle in her own words because they are lyrical, and because I feel they best convey the dream-like state inherent in these works. 

I’ve seen many, perhaps all, the different series Michelle’s painted, and whether her subject is seed pods or flowers, pots, interiors or views across a desert in Africa, it is the life force itself that she pays most attention to.

Michelle gave me the Emily Dickinson quote above. Like Dickinson, she is out with a lantern, and the light from her lantern falls on (the life force of) objects which we see again and again in these paintings.

Michelle has carried her lantern through Sicily, into Padua, into Venice, into Pompeii and Glasgow and regional Britain and has seen portholes and faces and chimneys and moons and boats and smoke and water and dry stone walls.  

Michelle wrote that in these paintings she is, “just drawing loose connections from travel experiences”. Hang on, loose connections? Not only are these antiquities, ruins, busts, statues, decorative elements, patinations, portholes, faces, chimneys, boats, smoke, water and dry stone walls not random, they are connected by the tightest bond – that of deep personal meaning. Look how many times she repeats them. These non-loose, urgent, important images migrated en masse into the underground chambers of her soul, and it is from this library of forms that the artist creates her compelling, unapologetic, vivid paintings.

What’s going on in these works? Here are symbols of life and of the seasons and also of death – dark, crematable and inevitable. Images marking the passage of time and place.

Michelle Brodie, our tour guide:  
“Pushed by the wind as if the wind of Sicily were blowing the breeze. The sun is full of heat, pale pink and green against a saturated, aged yellow sky. On board are large busts, face-on and in profile, divided by smoke from two chimneys. Beyond the bridge is the colour of terracotta, that ancient material of the handmade. The artisan’s knowledge is built up around this arch and signifies larger Venice beyond this peculiar special moment.”

“Glasgow – encircled in stone … Went to the Hunterian Gallery and found the two Chardin paintings. Looking into that mysterious hole in the barrel of the scullery maid, what is inside the darkness? I began seeing holes/voids everywhere in art. In Venice, the beautiful Belgian artist De Bruckyere and one of the protective blankets, a drapery to protect the forlorn, contained a hole.”

She peers into the darkness, into the spaces in between, the holes, the flaws, the question marks – observing and noting the bad seed. This subterranean, earthy, hidden darkness is the mortal experience of loss and change.

But wait, here comes the lantern – like Giotto’s anguished angels we can zoom up and away:

“Passages of paint drive the searching eye upward to sky, to moon, to universe.”

Michelle – traveller, yearner, searcher, stone capturer, looks over the forms on earth that are important to the painter. These forms that she paints and the paint she uses are, at one and the same time, both in the world and constituents of her inner world. Our shared outer world is the richer for their presence.

And for your presence, my friend.

– Sonia Legge