“I won’t sit at home and be sad.” Miche Watkins is one of the people who runs the North Street Gallery. An artist in her own right, she shares the themes that have continued throughout her life and how the female figure persists in her work.
by Jamillah Knowles
Miche Watkins is well known for her smaller paintings of familiar objects. Fruit and vegetables, lipsticks and flowers show up in her work, beautifully detailed on brightly coloured backgrounds in oil paintings a few inches across. These series have also led to commissions for more intriguing items. “The lipsticks were very popular. I’ve even painted a vibrator for someone, that was fun,” she smiles.
But as with many practiced artists, the greatest hits are not always as fulfilling as ongoing themes or fresh perspectives. “I love the bright colours,” Miche says, “But I feel that I have come to a natural end with the smaller oil paintings. I’ve done so many that I think I might be getting stale. I might come back to them, but I can’t see it at the moment.”
Miche’s shift is back to one that she has explored throughout her creative career. But her start in the arts was not without challenges. “My dad was disapproving of art colleges in general back in the late 60s and 70s. He didn’t want me to go to one. But I have always drawn and I have always drawn women, so when I was living in London, I went to night school for drawing.”
After she was married and her youngest child started school, she completed an arts foundation course and started a degree in illustration but personal circumstances meant that she had to give it up and the art education was put on hold.
Overnight inspiration
A move to Cape Town, South Africa, changed Miche’s creative style and colour palette. “Out there, the sunshine and colours are spectacular,” she remarks. “I started making pop art images, nearly always of women. People in Cape Town had bigger houses and space for really large paintings and I would do five-foot tall works and was taken on by a couple of galleries out there.”
Sadly her partner’s health deteriorated and the couple returned to the UK for treatment. “Within a few months, Les died,” she recalls. “The flat I live in is a one-bedroom place and although the light is amazing, it’s a smaller space and I couldn’t do any more of the really big paintings.”
Miche went to bed one night feeling stuck and woke up the next day with a good idea, she would start painting smaller oil paintings of fruit and veg. As her previous practice had been in acrylic line art, she took tutorials on YouTube in oil painting to gain new skills. Because the new works were around 8” across, there was space for her to continue the series.
Although these images have been very successful, the line art drew her back to the style she was enjoying. “I don’t want to do both,” she says. “I was reading a weekend supplement from the newspaper and I saw an article about Michael Craig-Martin and he is a pop artist. I looked at the paintings and thought, that’s what I do, but he uses more colours. I went to his exhibition and I was blown away and I thought, that’s what I want to do.”
The stumbling block was the space to work and store the paintings. “The works I am making are 90x60cm and I talked to others about trying a studio to get a space. I have applied but there are long waiting lists and I am not convinced I want to do that. I need space to store them. Then a friend of mine got in touch and said their church has dry space to store paintings. I’ve started creating the line art and I feel there is a domino effect coming on to create more work now that I have that extra space.”
The change in circumstances has pushed Miche’s work onwards, creating a new series about navigating life as a woman called ‘Alone but Not Lonely’. “This line art is in my DNA. Mine is all female-based in comparison with Michael Craig-Martin,” she says. “I feel strongly since my partner died that you can be really depressed and a victim, or you can grab life by the balls and do it. I’ve travelled by myself and had a lot of fun.”
“I started these on a solo holiday when I was looking at the swimming pool and I thought it would make a great painting. I started taking loads of photos of the swimming pool, the rest of the hotel guests thought I was bonkers, and I came across this woman with amazing sunglasses. I asked her if I could stand in the pool, borrow her glasses and take some pictures and she agreed. I started these paintings as a way of saying that you can still do things by yourself and have fun. I won’t sit at home and be sad.”
The most recent series, titled ‘She is Unknown’, portrays women either without facial details or no face at all. “I feel that we are more than just our faces,” she says. “People look at us to see if we are beautiful or not, and it pisses me off big time. So you will never see a woman’s face in that series.”
The return to line art paintings shows a development in Miche’s work and an evolution in the narratives she wants to share. “When I started the line art paintings, the woman was just a motif, no story. I used to go to the library and copy images from Vogue but they were just women without a character. Now I have found more of my voice, the women in my paintings have a story, it’s more about me and my life. I think paintings need a story and a title. The little oil paintings didn’t have that but I think these ones need the titles to draw people in to seeing what’s in the picture. ”
See more of Miche’s work at https://www.michewatkins.com/
Jamillah Knowles is a writer, artist, AI specialist and RWA Friend. You can read a Floating Circle Meet the Artist Q&A with her here.
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