A Well Beloved Landscape

At Winchester Galleries on Humboldt Street

September 12 - 26, 2009

Opening Reception
Saturday, September 12, 2009
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Lindy Michie was born in Dorset, England and lived there with her family until she left home at the age of sixteen.  Her paternal grandmother, Anne Redpath, is one of the most well known and best-loved Scottish painters of her time and her father, Alastair Michie, has had a distinguished career as a painter and sculptor.  Lindy moved to Vancouver in 1974, married in 1979 and relocated with her young family to Qualicum Beach in 1983.  After eighteen years of country life, a desire for change and new challenges brought her to Victoria where she currently resides with her husband and an ever-changing combination of family, friends and animals.

Colour excites me tremendously and provides my primary motivation for painting.  I prefer to use acrylic paint as it enables me to work quickly and, although I like the richness of oil, I find it too limiting.  I work in layers and like to have the paint very slippery and transparent.
These paintings emerge from the landscape of my childhood.  There is a timeless quality that exists in the hills of Dorset and a striking individuality in the small villages and farms.  Choose a century from the last ten and you’re certain to find that moment somewhere here. As well as being moved by its obvious beauty, I love the “lived in” feeling that permeates this countryside. 
All of the work I have produced over the years has somehow led me back to this source of inspiration and it just feels right for me to tap into it now.  This series of paintings has flowed almost effortlessly from my studio in the last few months.

“The textures and images Michie achieves give the impression of being not so much the result of adding to as subtracting from; the opposite of her grandmother’s impasto realism and, instead, a kind of pentimento technique of scraping away just enough of the painted surface to reveal successive layers beneath. In almost every case with these paintings, a reserved surface plane parts to reveal shimmeringly dramatic colours which, far from being secondary to the artist’s chosen shapes, seem to determine and explain their very existence” (Grant Hayter-Menzies, Galleries West Exhibition Reviews).