Consistent throughout Mireille’s paintings is the vibration and contrast of colors evoking rhythms of emotions. Color and rhythm drive her works, whether they are soft abstractions or bold and raw-textured expressions of feelings. They are alive and inviting, drawing the viewer in with mystery and invitations to introspection.
The subjects of her paintings fall comfortably into a few categories: landscapes, flowers and still lives, abstract expressions, and some referential figurative works in abstraction. Her technique when working in oil and acrylic is often a mix of bold strokes using brush techniques and a palette knife, adding impasto elements of texture and a three-dimensional element to many of her works.
In the small acrylic on paper with the notable woman with a red umbrella, we can see many of the characteristic elements in her works. It is a dramatic painting using texture, contrast and abstraction to evoke emotion. The gray cityscape rendered in a blended technique of bold textures and energetic strokes creates a dynamic atmosphere against which the red umbrella presents a striking visual impact in high contrast. Who is this solitary woman under the umbrella? There’s an urban romanticism and beautiful urban moment here in the rain. The image is open to interpretation and could be any city, though for Mireille it is New York.
Provence is evoked in this painting of a vase of yellow flowers, communicating the feeling and essence of the subject rather than fine details. The bold, visible strokes and colors and the heavy impasto application, notably in the yellow flowers, provide a strong sense of movement and energy. The yellow flowers are in a vibrant tension against the cool blue and green background, which adds depth and variation, preventing the piece from feeling overly simplistic. There’s joy and celebration in the painting, energy and vitality, but also the characteristic introspective mood of Mireille’s work.
Pierre Beskow, the distinguished Danish painter and academician, is an encouraging champion of Mireille’s work: “Her sense of color is distinguishing,” he said, “she has an eye that brings her canvases to life and are so full of energy. Her vision is quite mature and compelling.”
This balanced yet asymmetrical oil on canvas falls solidly in the abstract expressionist tradition. Its contrast between black, yellow, and white creates a striking visual impact, and its aggressive, almost chaotic brushstrokes and scraped areas suggest movement and spontaneity, rawness and unfiltered energy and unpredictability. The piece feels dynamic, not static, and juxtaposes order versus disorder, control versus freedom. Again, color controls. The black form dominates, bisecting the golden yellow and creating tension and an almost sculptural quality to the design, while the rough-textured effects of the white areas add a feeling of unpredictability.
This almost luminous oil on canvas filled with loose, swirling, energetic brushstrokes creates a feeling of movement and spontaneity. The blended and layered paint applications by both brushes and palette knives give the painting its textured and dynamic feel. But it is the vibrant colors, of course—the fiery reds, deep oranges, and hints of black and green–that convey warmth, energy, and passion is its signature. The painting succeeds in feeling alive and is an expressive release of raw emotion that is explosive yet controlled.
Mireille’s oldest artist friend and supporter from New York, Carole Randall, who visited Mireille in Provence, just marvels at how her paintings of landscapes and nature are like zoom lenses bringing the outside to a window on the inside. This semi-abstract blend of realism with expressive brushwork captures the reflection, solitude, and vast beauty of nature outside her window in Provence. The dark, mysterious mountains contrast sharply with the warm, glowing tones of the middle ground and the textured sky. The brushwork in the sky gives the impression of wind or shifting weather, while the loosely blended foreground greens give the impression of a grassy or open field. The layering of tones creates the feeling of depth and distance. No question the deep blacks and blues in the mountains add majesty and wonder to the overall captured idea of beauty, solitude and timelessness. For all its expression of power, Mireille’s canvas is characteristically not static. She succeeds in conveying nature as being in constant motion.
Mireille’s paintings are all mostly untitled, though some have titles in her head or with associations with an event or story. “When a painting speaks to me, grabs my attention and makes me feel, I know it. I like it. The painting and I share an attraction, and that is what I hope happens to people who look at my work,” she explains. “When they put one up on their wall, they own it and live with it, and they should name it what they like, their special name or title. What does it represent to them? Naming a painting is kind of fun. I rarely remember the titles artists give to their paintings, and even some of my own have a short title in my head that probably would not make sense to most people. Inviting the viewer to title a painting is an invitation to them to interpret it subjectively.”
More representative paintings:
