About Michelle’s Art Practice : inspiration and influences

Artist Statement

Michelle Cobbin is a painter who lives and works in Brighton, UK. She is an experienced yogi and meditator. At the heart of all her practices is a search for peace. Her artwork explores stillness, peacefulness and simplicity through paintings of abstracted landscapes. Most recently her work has evolved to include recognisable motifs from fragments of memories.

Michelle grew up in a small village in rural Suffolk next to a large US military airbase. The flat landscape of East Anglia has been the inspiration for much of her work. She uses the idea of a landscape to explore the inner and outer landscape through simplicity of composition and colour to evoke a mood or feeling. This led her to research her ancestry, who it transpires, have lived in the same small region for centuries, working the land. She became intrigued that although she left East Anglia as a teen, she has continued to live on chalk ground. Now it’s the South Downs just outside Brighton where throughout the pandemic she was making links between these two landscapes and mapping daily mindful walks on the Downs.

Last year, reading in the news about the imminent return of nuclear weapons to Lakenheath US airbase, Michelle was compelled to make work about her own memories of living next to the base in the 1970s and ‘80s with the knowledge of nuclear weapons being stored there, and with the constant din of fighter jets exercising overhead. The new work depicts recognisable objects painted in a child-like manner.

Finding ways to explore Peace, be it by the act of making artwork, or creating paintings that evoke a sense of peace in the viewer, or depicting motifs of war to raise awareness of propaganda are all equally important in Michelle’s practice.