an article by Gary Michael Dault in Grapevine Magazine, Art, Culture, Food and Wine, Spring 2025
Roads to Freedom: the Art of Michèle LaRose
I had visited painter Michèle LaRose’s studio in Kingston once before—back in 2018 when I was writing about her work for a now defunct Montreal-based magazine called Vie des Arts. I remember admiring her bright, light-filled workplace back then, its charming, compact feeling of tool-box-like efficiency. How inescapably conducive the place seemed to be as a place to work. If you can’t make art here, I remember thinking, you surely couldn’t make it anywhere.
Six years later, which is to say a couple of weeks ago, I found myself admiring the studio again. This time, though, it seemed different. It felt less fierce, somehow, less imperative, than I had remembered it, less a machine for painting, and more a place in which one might simply be a painter. The buoyant little building—adjacent to the comfortable house that is home to LaRose and her husband, novelist Chris Laing (he writes mystery novels)—now seemed almost to float upon a bounded sea of creative bustle. It seemed now more the locus of possibility, of opportunity, rather than the site of intimidation or challenge or uphill struggle.
Maybe it was just me that had changed, but it seems to me the paintings have been changing too. I confess to having found LaRose’s paintings in the past to have been be a bit on the clenched side, a tad too deliberate, too planned, too overseen, to permit much of the exuberant entry into them that I usually expected of painting (I am an old abstract-expressionist at heart, and feel more at home with painterly mayhem than with painterly order). I always loved LaRose’s bold yet nuanced use of colour—she is a virtuoso colourist—but her usually small, relentlessly abstract paintings, which are almost always built on square grounds (a square is a notoriously difficult format to compose within), often struck me as so highly resolved, so commandeered by the artist, that I couldn’t find my way into them.
She has been known to say scary, more or less exhausting things (scary to me anyhow) about her process like, for example, “I paint to the point where there’s nothing left to do in the picture” and she has asked questions of herself like “How many shapes do you need to keep a painting interesting?” Proscriptive statements like these always make me nervous.
But as I say, the work is changing. Her series of Glyphs from 2022, for example, consist of only two elements, a monotonal ground upon which she has positioned a solitary, biomorphic, rather Arp-like form: a deft rendition of the less-is-more adage. In the following year, in 2023, she produced a long, absorbing and very richly worked series of paintings she called her Shades of Gray paintings (one of which is reproduced here). And she is currently making a lot of monotypes—vertiginous, one-off, handmade prints on paper—that deliver the raucous, chest-tightening visual cacophony my sensibility craves (see her handsome and aptly titled oil-monotype, Contemplating Change, also reproduced here). Things are definitely loosening up.
I’ve come to feel that, fundamentally, LaRose isn’t so much formulaic or programmatic in her work as much as she is simply deeply absorbed in it, patient with it and delighted when it ends in what she feels to be a satisfying full-stop. She is a very deliberate painter, yes. This is not to say, however, that her paintings actually lack passion or dynamism. It seems to me that she simply prefers to work the paintings quietly and very carefully through the fullness of time, coming gradually and, one feels, irrevocably, to what she considers a work’s final form. As she wrote in a poem accompanying an exhibition at Kingston’s Elm Café in 2018, “How to interpret/ The world that I see/ Absorb the shapes and the colours/And bring new life to be.”
While LaRose goes to prepare a welcoming mug of foaming latte (it’s ten a.m.), I nestle beside her cheerful wood-burning studio stove and glory in the place’s enticements, its open invitation to paint. LaRose returns with the lattes and an encouraging smile. Where to begin? Everything is so sublimely organized here (files, labeled boxes, carefully stacked art books), you feel that even a ragged or misshapen question might bring the whole undertaking crashing down.
She starts. “Do you want to hear a dream I had all the time as a child?” she asks me. I do indeed. I’m priming myself for dark forests, glaring moons or maybe hundreds of rabid squirrels chasing her across Arctic ice floes.
“Well,” she begins, “there’s this line painted on a blank background. I want the line to be straight, but it always gets jumbled. And I think to myself, “maybe I can straighten it out again.” She takes a sip of latte and sighs pleasurably. “I love that dream,” she tells me.
“That’s it?” I ask her. “It’s a careful dream,” she admits. “But I don’t think it’s about compulsiveness. I think it’s just about my interest in controlling things. I view it as the start of my fascination with abstract shapes that I can bend to my will.”
It’s strange, though, how divided (or multifarious) she can seem. As she stated in a text written as recently as last January to accompanied a very large exhibition of her work at the Station Gallery in Coburg, Ontario, “When I paint, I prefer to start without a clear idea of where the work will end. I discover it as I go along and respond to what is there. Improvising like this is a challenge and a thrill. Despite my focus on abstraction, my work is based on reality, in the sense that many things I find fascinating in the world eventually work their way into my paintings. Sometimes it is a sensation or feeling that guides my colour choices. Other times it is a shape or energy that has embedded itself in my brain, a shadow, the stem of a drooping flower, the graceful movement of cats, shards of ice or drifts of snow. I try not to analyze too much when I paint; I just go with instinctive yet considered moves or choices that sometimes yield surprising results. I like to think that my paintings reveal to me what is so exciting and terrifying about being alive.”
I believe her, but this still strikes me as a rather strange statement from her. Sensations of feeling? A harvestable shadow? The stem of a drooping flower? Shards of ice? This is the kind of testament you tend to get from a much fleshier, more impulsive, more hurtling kind of artist: something you might expect from a Delacroix or a Bonnard or a De Kooning or a Cecily Brown. Especially when you think back over LaRose’s huge inventory of small, square paintings with their endlessly abutting coloured segments of clear pigment, fitting together tightly like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
But I am taking her at her word. For one thing, where her colour has often felt incarcerated within her paintings, it is also becoming increasingly unrestrained (or at least let’s say barely restrained). And more performative. We’re browsing through a box of paintings and come to this quite small work on paper that takes my head clear off. “Whoa,” I say, “what is that??” She pulls it out so we can examine it properly. It doesn’t have an actually title (none of that frippery for LaRose) but it has a designation number: G1.
What is so damned compelling about this strict little painting (shown here)? G1, she tells me, is her first gouache of 2017. I love it. Note those two contending arcs of red and yellow near the top, each taking a bite out the other. Note the solidity of the big, tough-minded, central maroon slab upon which the entire painting seems to be constructed. Most of all, note the wicked yellow flange rearing up from the bottom. You feel as if you want to get out of its way. Here, LaRose’s colour areas are engaged with one another but not mutually constrained. The result is a permissive, open radiance, rather than a sort of coloured command performance.
In much of her earlier painting, LaRose’s colour panels are enchained by supports and barriers. In a painting like G1, they are set free to undergo mutual encounters, to mix and mingle. You can take a breath. I’d say that, more and more, Michele LaRose is giving her paintings their freedom.
Gary Michael Dault