This series of small drawings by Michelle Zacharias began during a dark period in the artist’s life, followed by a longer period of darkness worldwide. After two heart surgeries, Zacharias did not have the energy to do lengthy pieces or labour intensive dust paintings and also learned that drawing on a hard surface with coloured pencil became painful. Her signature styles of using dust as pigment or coloured pencil in detailed abstracts would have to wait. Determined to create, she made a small drawing everyday using paint, oil pastels, or wax crayons. As strength returned, she added colour pencil. With the upcoming Tokyo Olympics threatening to be a super spreader of COVID-19, circles or rings have taken on additional meaning.

The Circles series originally began as an offshoot of the anthropocene work Zacharias has been doing related to the seasonal dust storms in Asia. Beautiful sunsets result from those dust particles in the air, causing the light to refract. A single circle on a page provides the frame but also suggests a particle of dust. A coloured sunset when confined to a geometric shape becomes an abstraction of the original. Soon she added smaller circles or dots representing dust. Then virus-shaped objects. The drawings eventually became small abstractions that no longer referenced anything natural.

As the world has learned these past two years, small can be significant and our daily lives can be simplified.

Michelle Zacharias

Michelle Zacharias is a Canadian visual artist based in both Saitama City and Kitakyushu, Japan. Zacharias always seems to be on the outside looking in. Is she a Canadian or a Japanese artist? She works primarily in colour pencil, and natural pigments such as dust, and received an award at the Kyoto International Festival of the Arts for her drawings. Her training as a printmaker is obvious in the details beneath her complex colours and chaotic lines.

ミッシェル・ザカライアス：

日本に20年以上住んでいるカナダ人アーティスト。今日本のアーティストかカナダのアーティスト？　いつでも、どこでも、新人の感じをして、中からじゃなくて外から見られる気がする。主に色鉛筆を使って制作活動を行っており、京都芸術祭で国際芸術賞を受賞した。複雑な色使いと混沌とした作風が保守的だとか、芸術的すぎるとの批評家のコメントも理解しているが、彼女にとって芸術とは、商業的でも概念的でもなく、自分自身が楽しんで取り組むものなのだ。