The layers and layers of Bev Michel

HOWARD SACKSTEIN

Michel was one of the most popular art teachers in Johannesburg for 33 years until she gave it all up at the end of last year to focus on her own art.

She decided that she owed it to her soul to focus on her own creativity.

With an honours degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in fine art and painting, Michel has trained hundreds of young pupils. Mothers would actually call her from the Park Lane Clinic to book space in her art classes for their newborn children. She has taught children and adults for decades, but one of her teachers and mentors, Fema Gavin, changed all of that.

Teaching takes time, and there was no time left to create and evolve as an artist. Michel would work on six huge canvasses at the same time in her studio and then, the pupils would arrive, and the momentum was lost.

Michel needed to focus.

Doing this was obviously something she had thought about, but didn’t do for many years. When she effectively changed careers, she recalled how Gavin said to her about 10 years earlier, “You are so gifted, you are so talented. Stop wasting your time, give up your art school, and go to your studio and paint.”

Michel was so energised by Gavin’s advice, knowing she would never say something she didn’t mean, that she took all the artwork she had crafted under this mentor’s tutelage, and painted over it. It’s not that she didn’t like what she had done, but she wanted to do something unique.

That was part of her journey. She began to layer. She put layer over layer of paint over her original paintings in a technique known as palimpsest. Michel uses water wash transparent glazes and works up towards a thick impasto made up of gooey viscose layers of paint applied with a pallet knife scraped onto the canvas. “It is an amazing effect, [and I] never know exactly what the end process will look like,” she says.

All Michel’s canvasses are massive. Her style defies description, combining abstract, modern, contemporary, and quasi impressionist art. Her work unites layers of textures and palimpsest over a previous artwork highlighting the parts of the painting that protrude from the canvas, thereby creating inexplicable depth, sensuality, and three-dimensional texture.

Some works have more than 300 layers of paint, creating an interplay between shadow and light.

Michel’s solo exhibition at the mmARThouse in Craighall in early November showed 40 mammoth works. Although much of her work is based on flora, it’s more about texture and depth.

Everything inspires Michel. When she gets to her studio, she has to focus on one thing, but her attention deficit disorder allows her to work on six or seven paintings at the same time, as she sweats away, layering each painting, then moving to the next, giving each layer three days to dry.

“Nothing in life is original. Every artist takes something from the artists that came before them,” she says. “What teaches you is copying artists to learn from their experience and techniques.” She has taught this lesson to hundreds of her students. But Michel’s art is truly unique. Her life and art has evolved from her time in Bethal, with no art teacher and a teach-it-yourself art book, to a modernist accomplished artist and that, says Michel, “is the river”.