Essay by Art historian Wilfrid Wright on Michele Franklin

Michèle Franklin paints under the stern, unblinking eye of Rembrandt, who surveys her easel from the poster pinned up on the opposite wall. His self-portrait judges everything she makes. ‘He's always with me,’ she says, ‘and he's looking and he's saying, “it has to be better”.’ Progress is a strange word in the context of art, especially in an era where the Western tradition is no longer considered in terms of an Hegelian evolution, and the notion that art is a craft, to be studied, learned, adapted and improved, has been summarily dismissed. Yet, there are still those who consider themselves part of a progressive culture where skills are shared and the work of the masters studied for what it can teach artists of the present about humanity and feeling and how to represent them through the ages. Franklin is one of them.

She has been painting for nearly half a century – although, studying Painting and Sculpture at Camberwell (1977–81), she found herself more drawn to the latter discipline, eventually graduating with a commendation in sculpture. Working in three dimensions taught her the importance of observational drawing and instilled an understanding of the relationship between 2D and 3D that exists across every medium. The painting department at Camberwell was, in the late 1970s, still dominated by the aesthetics of the Euston Road School and the influence of figures such as William Coldstream, Victor Passmore and Claude Rogers, who had taught many of Franklin’s tutors in the late 1930s. Franklin undertook a rigid training of measurement and material appreciation, using techniques unchanged since the Renaissance, which fostered a respect for process that remains an essential part of her practice.

Much of Franklin’s early works were studies of friends and family – sculptures in clay or paintings in oil. Despite the rigid process of measuring that she had adopted from Camberwell, these works, such as the portraits of her favourite art school models, Lolly and Paul, are remarkably fluid, demonstrating enormous technical aptitude as well as an intuitive empathy for her models which she was able to impart into the work. However, she was yet to mature into her own distinctive painterly style, and her early work still emulated that of artists she admired: painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Masaccio, Bellini, Mantegna, Michelangelo and Titian; masters of the Dutch Golden Age including Hals and Rembrandt (of course); and Impressionists like Corot, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Morisot, and Van Gogh. But it was the work of the Moderns of the early 20th century, and in particular that of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) that captivated her most. Soutine’s direct, expressive canvases do not depict the world he observed so much as his reaction to it – an approach that defines Franklin’s art, also.

Like Soutine, Franklin is a dedicated student of nature, preferring to work from life. Although still life forms a major part of her oeuvre, the preeminent focal point of her work has always been the human form and, in particular, the naked female body. As has been stated, she is acutely aware of her work’s existence within a wider context of art history – a predominantly masculine history in which the female body has been presented as an object to be desired, owned and exploited. It is a reality keenly felt by Franklin, who came of age in a male-dominated art world where sexism and misogyny were rife. By contrast, however, her women are not objects, although her rendering of the female form is often deeply sensual (a fact that has led to spurious questions around the artist’s sexuality). Instead, her paintings express the inner humanity of her subjects, their eroticism an expression of power rather than a submission to the viewer’s gaze. Womanhood is a theme that runs deep, especially in her paintings of birth and motherhood – an experience only a woman can know – and her defining images of the nuances of female fellowship, such as the Friendship Quartet (c.1987-88). This polyptic in four panels tracks the relationship between two women – a private drama of alienation, confrontation and reconciliation. Franklin is particularly drawn to the grace and power of the female form in movement and many of her compositions incorporate poses that emphasise tension, highlighting the model’s control over their body, their nudity expressing physical and emotional freedom. By contrast, her images of birth were not studies from life; instead, they recall from her imagination her own experience of pregnancy and the feeling of losing control of her body.

Franklin is immensely proud of her Jewish identity, which often surfaces in her art. Turning to the male form in the mid-1990s, she produced a number of charcoal studies of anguished figures which developed into a significant and controversial series of works on paper exploring the Holocaust, created over nearly a decade and inspired by Claude Lanzemann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah. ‘I always had a horrific idea of the Holocaust with really extreme images,’ she recounted in 1999; ‘in Shoah, the notion of human nature came through, particularly in [Lanzemann’s] interviews… There was no remorse. I realised how self-interested people are.’ Her feelings are palpable in the works, which depict scenes of incarceration, dehumanisation, torture and murder. Franklin titled the series Where Was the Whole World? and the drawings have a hazy, flickering quality reflective of the fading collective memory of the atrocities. It is a deeply harrowing group of works which has subsequently fed into further explorations of issues around race and the capacity for inhumanity.

The latest of these is a group of paintings and works on paper partially inspired by Monique Roffey’s novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), the story of a centuries-old woman cursed by the jealous wives of her Caribbean island to live as a mermaid. Caught by a fishing net on the fictional island of Black Conch in the 1970s, she begins a painful transition back into human form and a complex romance with her rescuer/captor. The series is in many ways a response to Franklin’s own black heritage and her experiences of rejection, racism, love, loss and an increasing sense of self-empowerment which she attributes to aging. In these works, she has moved away from painting directly from life, instead using a method of filming her models and working from the footage, splicing together images and angles that lends her pictures a cinematic quality – a technique first developed for the Where Was the Whole World series.

The majority of these new works are in charcoal – a preferred medium (second only to oil paint) as ‘it moves almost as fast as the artist can think.’ A large part of the series is a collection of studies of giant waves, which have lent her exhibition at the Oxo Gallery its title: Waves of Emotion. The waves, coupled with her drawings and paintings of two-tailed Afro-Caribbean merwomen have a power and freedom that is indicative of so much of Franklin’s work, expressive and imaginative images that possess an acute sense of psychological animation. However, despite the implied narrative content of much of her work, ultimately, Franklin’s practice is about learning to look and learning to see, nurturing the intimate relationship between artist, model, painting and viewer. Her art is about humanity, a quality that is not self-evident but has to be searched for. Above all, for her, it is about striving to be better. ‘I’ll never be Rembrandt,’ she states, humbly, ‘but all you can do is just admire the people who do it so well and learn from them.’

Wilfrid Wright

May 2026