Michelle Nguyen's 'Harpies Nesting' featured in House and Home
Michelle Nguyen's painting, Harpies Nesting, has been included House and Home's "13 Colours to Elevate Your Comfort Zone".
When discussing her process, Nguyen states, "I often pull figures from classical painting (often female nudes), and use them as references for my works. For large-scale works, I use a projector to trace their likeness onto canvas. Through the process of painting, they are stripped of their humanity and slowly transformed into various hybrid beasts—they sprout snakes from their scalp and fur all over their bodies. Their feet become hooves and hands claws, and sometimes, the figures disappear altogether into the background. This methodology fits well within the themes of my work, which have been mainly focused on metamorphosis, and how difficult, painful, and slow (but necessary!) changing and growing can be."
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Michelle Nguyen’s dark, whimsical paintings explore the adventures of eccentric, fictionalized bodies and the spaces they occupy. Made primarily in oils, Nguyen's canvases are populated by humorous, and even grotesque figures who explore strange social environments that appear to be part dream, part nightmare. Nguyen uses oil pastel, loose gestural markings and ambient colours to illustrate worlds dense with mythology, symbolism, and narrative.
Born in Toronto, Nguyen currently lives and works in Vancouver. She studied Environmental Design and received her undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia in 2016.