Michelle La Perrière
A native of Denver, Colorado, Michelle La Perrière knew she would be an artist as a child. She has lived in Maryland since 1987, when she moved to Baltimore for graduate study with Grace Hartigan at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her drawings, paintings, prints, and mixed media collages combine image fragments from visual source materials with observed and imagined forms and spaces. Her work has been shown in the United States, France and Japan, and is in private and public collections including Syracuse University and the Borg-Warner Corporation.
Beginning her studies at The University of Colorado, Boulder, and Parsons School of Design, New York, she went on to receive her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Mayor’s Advisory Council on Art and Culture, numerous MICA faculty development grants, and MICA’s award for Excellence in Teaching. Selected residencies include the Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, Wyoming (twice), The Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, Georgia, The Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, New York, and The International Program for Artists in Rochefort en Terre, Brittany, France. She has been teaching at MICA since 1992 and served as Co-Chair of the Foundation Department for ten years (2000 to 2010).
Artist Statement
How do we hold it all? All of it? Without breaking? With acceptance and at times, reverence? Whatever it is. The death. The flood. The fire. External.
Internal. There is disruption. There was shattering. There will be splintering. And yet. There is - The bloom within the weeds. The sparkle and gentle lap
of the water. The light and warmth from the blaze. My work is about witnessing and watching, about feeling and capturing the complexities of this time, and that time, and the time before. The work is the container that holds what cannot be contained. Touch is paramount, its fullness celebrated. In addition to rendering with intimate focus - graphite, paint or cut paper and glue gentling a surface, the mercurial mark is welcome - scrawls of energetic bursts, allowed. Physical contact, in combination with image and space, enable the interwoven existence of past, present and future, dream and despair, grief and healing.
Psithurusm
Psithurism, a word that means the sound of wind moving through trees, its origins meaning whispering, was “given” to me in a conversation with an old friend. Although this drawing shows bowls of cherry pits, amaryllis flowers, and birch trees, what’s really there – in the spaces, in the tiny pencil marks and luminosities – is the whispering, the drawing of the sound of leaves in the wind, and our silently echoing breath.
Michelle La Perrière, “Psithurism”, 2023
Medium: graphite on paper; 72x42"
