Michelle Friars is an artist and photographer living on a island in the Salish Sea.
Her background as an art historian specializing in medieval and 14th Italian art left her with a love of narrative art and a particular fascination with tales of mystery and the miraculous. She tries to reflect that sensibility in her work, something she hopes will entice viewers to invent stories of their own.
Michelle works primarily with carbon pencil, charcoal, and pan pastel. She loves the graphic nature of black and white and the uncluttered way this allows the expression of ideas. She specializes in large scale portraiture and narrative figurative work. For Michelle, drawings are an end in themselves, not merely a step on the way to painting..
Michelle is also a digital photographer. Her photographic work embodies some of the same graphic aesthetics but is less grounded in realism and pushes at the boundaries of abstraction.
Her background as an art historian specializing in medieval and 14th Italian art left her with a love of narrative art and a particular fascination with tales of mystery and the miraculous. She tries to reflect that sensibility in her work, something she hopes will entice viewers to invent stories of their own.
Michelle works primarily with carbon pencil, charcoal, and pan pastel. She loves the graphic nature of black and white and the uncluttered way this allows the expression of ideas. She specializes in large scale portraiture and narrative figurative work. For Michelle, drawings are an end in themselves, not merely a step on the way to painting..
Michelle is also a digital photographer. Her photographic work embodies some of the same graphic aesthetics but is less grounded in realism and pushes at the boundaries of abstraction.
