The Art of Capturing Water
An Interview with Michelle Lucking
Renowned for her breathtaking pastel paintings of water, award-winning artist Michelle Lucking has carved out a distinctive niche in contemporary art. With a deep fascination for the movement, light, and texture of water, her work masterfully captures the essence of its ever-changing nature.
Michelle’s pieces have been celebrated internationally, with collectors and luxury hospitality spaces drawn to the tranquillity and depth her artwork evokes. In this exclusive interview, we explore Michelle’s artistic journey, her creative process, and the inspirations that shape her work. We also gain insight into her thoughts on emerging trends in the art world and how they influence her approach—particularly in the context of luxury hospitality.
Q: Can you share a little about your background and what initially drew you to becoming an artist?
As a child and young adult, painting had been a huge part of my life and took up most of my free time outside of school. But crippled by self doubt and lacking any confidence, I stopped painting altogether at the age of 18. I missed it dreadfully but channelled myself into a very unfulfilling corporate career instead. I felt increasingly frustrated and limited by my own life, and inability to express myself in a way that felt genuine. I was, looking back, edging further into long-term depression, and felt unable to see any joy in my job or future career progression.
Finding my way back into painting, after stopping at the age of 18 came quite accidentally, when I stumbled upon the pastel work of Zaria Foreman. I hadn’t used soft pastel before, and had always linked pastels to impressionistic mark making art. However, Zaria was creating enormous, hyper-realistic icebergs in soft pastel, using her hands to blend the colours to create extraordinary realism. I’d been inspired by art before, but this had a different impact on me. It sounds ridiculous, but I had a very sudden and immediate urge to try finger-painting using pastel. I literally bought some pastel and paper the next day and after not painting for almost 20 years, I started my first painting and was addicted instantly. I would steal any moment I could find to sneak back to my painting – I’d stay up late painting, and I’d wake up at 4 am to go back to my painting. That was 10 years ago. Once I started painting, dropping out of the corporate career to pursue painting full time was the easiest, and simultaneously most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.
Q: Your work focuses heavily on seascapes and underwater portraits. What inspired you to make this a central theme in your art?
I would always describe myself first and foremost as someone with a close affinity with water. I have always lived near water and have spent so much time in and on the sea. I find everything about it captivating: the smell, the sound, how it feels on my skin, how it reflects and refracts light. Water is a constantly changing body that seems alive in its ever-shifting moods; from transparent to reflective, from calm to turbulent. I find I can channel so much of my own inner emotions into paintings that depict water. As a keen swimmer, it was only natural to evolve my paintings to include underwater portraiture and with that allowing myself to explore people’s relationship to water and it’s ability to cleanse and heal.
Q: How do you go about capturing the movement and essence of water in pastel, a medium not typically associated with fluidity?
I work, mostly, from photos rather than from life, so the first thing to remember, as an artist, is that you’re not capturing a moving liquid, but a static image composed of colours and shapes. It makes the concept of capturing water much less daunting if you can break it down into its simplest elements of shapes and colour. However, it’s critical to remember that the most import element that makes water so alive and beautiful, is how light affects water (and water affects light). I think if you weave this correctly into your painting, the viewer is more likely to believe they’re looking at water. One of my favourite examples would be transparent pool water that has those bright, refracted rays of lights, languishing at the bottom of the pool and breaking into tiny rainbow shards. I’m not painting something transparent though – I’m capturing how the light is briefly caught and projected by the moving water. Building those light elements into your paintings doesn’t have to be restricted to wet mediums. In fact, I’d argue pastel is a superior medium for this as the colours are the purest pigment available to an artist. I can create incredibly vivid colours using soft pastels, and the medium itself allows so many layers to be built up, allowing the suggestions of transparency and hard light edges simultaneously.
Q: Can you walk us through your creative process, from inspiration to completion of a piece?
I think the entire process is what I love most about being an artist because the journey is so long, and can take such unexpected twists and turns. Many people think the painting starts when I start sketching the image out, but in truth for me the painting starts months, sometimes years before this moment. It can be an idea I get and start playing around in my head. I create mood boards and build on the initial idea. It’s only once I get to this stage, I’ll even start to think about organising a photoshoot. This next stage becomes really time consuming as I will need to find suitable locations, and models if it’s a swimming photoshoot. If a model is involved I always buy clothes (initially this was bikinis, but with time I have bought dresses, fabric and my last photoshoot involved a wedding uchikake in the sea). The concept is continually evolving – even once on location, despite having a clear idea of what I want to capture, I find that the weather, the sea, the general mood of the day, the model – it all influences the images that are captured that day. And that is so exciting – the fact that the concept just takes on its own life and continues to grow and evolve.
Once I’ve captured the photos I spend days, if not weeks, going through all the images to identify strong, stand apart compositions. I like to keep a very open mind at this point, and quite often a whole new concept will railroad the original one. Once I’ve got to this stage I will build up a portfolio of images that will become future paintings, and are bound together by an over-riding story or theme. It’s a thrilling moment, as it’s the end of many months of conceptualising. This is the stage where the images then finally get turned into actual paintings. Because my head tends to be exploding with new ideas, I have many portfolios either being worked on or waiting to be executed.
Once I start on a painting that becomes my sole focus until it’s finished. Because of the level of detail I like to create, I tend to build up a piece with many layers which allows a richer finish of colour. The process of creating one of my pieces is always time consuming, and quite often a painting can take several weeks to complete.
Q: How do your personal experiences and emotions influence your artistic expression?
Conveying memories, and specifically the emotions evoked by those memories is intrinsic to my process – that’s one of the main reasons I only ever use my own reference photos. The painting is always so much more than copying the photo; I recreate in my head all the feelings and memories of the moment the photo was taken and try to bring the essence of that into the painting itself. A beautiful photo doesn’t quite capture what the eye, the heart and your memories encapsulate, so my paintings are never a slavish copy of the photo, but rather a combination of that and how I remember that moment felt when the image was captured.
Q: What role does photography play in your artistic process?
Photography (including underwater photography) is as critical to my process, especially for the underwater portraiture paintings. I haven’t been formally trained in photography and had to learn on the go, and as my artistic confidence and technical skill has increased, so has the need for my photography skills to catch up, as I’ve demanded more and more detail from my reference images, and the ability to skilfully capture the concepts in my head. As an artist who strives for realism in my work, an excellent quality reference photo allows me to recreate the little nuances in my paintings that I believe nudges my work that bit closer to drawing the viewer in and making them feel like they could reach out and touch the water.
I am most heavily influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, specifically their attention to detail and use of rich fabrics. Although possibly not so prevalent in my earlier or current work, many of the more recent photoshoots I have done all encompass rich use of heavily patterned fabric, and it’s certainly a direction I am moving towards.
Q: How has your work evolved over time, and what factors have driven this evolution?
I think as my technical skill and confidence has increased over the years, so has my interest in more complex subject matter (specifically intricately embroidered fabrics) and interestingly, my work is now moving in a darker direction and away from more colour saturated images. I’m preferring the narrative of ocean underwater photoshoots as opposed to swimming pool shoots, involving models with fabrics and clothing and darker backdrops in colder water and forests of kelp. In addition, I have been learning how to incorporate gold leaf with soft pastel. The two mediums are not traditionally used together, and it’s been a steep learning curve on how the two can be successfully combined. But the lustre of the gold next to the softness of the pastel creates a beautiful and unusual contrast I’m keen to explore further.
Q: As someone who specialises in pastels, do you see a growing appreciation for this medium in contemporary art?
Definitely. I’ve seen the Royal Society of Portrait Painters accept the first pastel portrait in the last year, where previously they had only accepted oil and acrylic work. Some incredible pastel pieces are winning prestigious international awards, and I’ve seen some very established oil painters actually start using soft pastel. With the advances of readily available, high-quality, archival pastel specific paper, and museum grade, UV protective glass, pastel paintings are no longer considered the fragile medium they were once thought to be.
Q: Many of your collectors come from luxury hospitality settings. What do you think makes your work particularly suited for high-end hotels, bars, and restaurants?
There’s an escapism about my paintings that I deliberately strive for, both in realism and scale – I want my work to be all-encompassing, to pull the viewer in. I believe hotels,restaurants and bars all have a similar lure for people – a chance of escapism, to get away and enjoy oneself, and momentarily leave the daily grind behind. The nature of what I paint works perfectly for many of these settings too – the attraction of a beautiful, empty beach scene, or cooling turquoise waters of a poolside with a swimmer bathed in sunlight – it’s evocative of happy memories many of us will have.
I believe there’s a timeless accessibility about water too, that never feels alien in any environment and creates a soothing backdrop. Something I take great care of is ensuring that I create empathetic art towards its environment, be it the sun reflecting pebbles of the river Spey, running through the heart of the Scottish distilleries, or the colourful, saturated images of bikini clad swimmers evoking holiday idealism in a cocktail bar.
Q: Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for your artistic journey, and are there any upcoming projects you’re particularly excited about?
Right now, I’m incredibly exciting about working on some larger pieces celebrating feminine strength, involving what will be some of my most complex work to date following an amazing photoshoot in Cornwall using vintage Japanese kimonos and Chrysanthemums. I’m planning on incorporating gold leaf in some of the pieces.
Q: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring artists looking to make their mark in the art world today?
It sounds cliché but the most important advice I would give anyone is to find your own voice, and the things that really make your heart sing and to turn that into art. Because that’s always going to be unique to you, and therefore original – and your love for your subject matter will always show in your work.