Painted music by Michelle Jezierski

Michelle Jezierski’s studio smells of oil paint and the floor is so colorful that it also looks a bit like a work of art. The huge windows are also impressive, sometimes even letting too much sun into the studio. Because that interferes with painting, Michelle has white curtains that she can then close.

Otherwise, however, light plays an important role in her work. Michelle is often inspired by the sky, clouds and landscapes, which she photographs and hangs in a corner of her studio. The light is like a paintbrush that bathes the landscape in a wide variety of colors. As a child, Michelle liked light blue best, and even though she says she likes all colors today, we can still spot a suspicious amount of light blue on the canvases around us.

Michelle’s paintings have very different formats, but are always divided into individual fragments, smaller, often strip-shaped units. This looks as if she had painted a landscape, then cut it into strips and reassembled it, as she shows on her paper collages. In the paintings, however, the cutting and reassembling already happens in her head before the picture is put on the canvas. The landscape is then no longer clearly recognizable, but other things are, for example feelings or moods. Michelle likes the fact that each person sees something different in her paintings.

When we ask Michelle why she chose stripes as her form, she says that it also has something to do with light: The striped neon lights in Las Vegas burned into her memory when she studied in the U.S. for a semester. But when she later tells us that the tiger is her favorite animal, we think that the stripes surely have something to do with it, too.

Michelle also talks a lot about music because she grew up with it. We can see that in an old photo in her kitchen, where she can be seen as a child with a wind instrument next to her dad. Her parents both make music by profession. Michelle used to think that she might want to be a musician, too, but she ended up liking painting better. She is also quite happy about that, because pictures can be painted in silence before they are shown. Music, on the other hand, is often played live on a stage, which would be a bit too exciting for Michelle. Nevertheless, music is very important for her paintings. When we look at the many different works, it also feels a bit like the stripes in each painting follow a different rhythm. And if we squint, they might even become staves.