ABOUT ME

I was born in a traditional mud hut in Cameroon, French west Africa in 1951. I did not get on well with the French school system so, at the age of six i was sent to boarding school in my native Holland. I did no better there and after seven years I was sent for psychology tests. I was diagnosed with dyslexia, my treatment was to be sent to school for mentally ill young people, where I stayed for two months. At the age of thirteen I was living in Paris with my parents, where i attended my first art school, I have always found it easier to express myself in drawings. Next, we moved to Bangkok, where I rented out a river house on stilts as a studio and had lessons from an English painter. At seventeen I traveled to Israel, Greece, Italy, France, England, Mexico America and Spain, visiting the art galleries as I went. I liked England and wanted to stay, I went to city and guilds art school in London for four years, it was there that I met my wife.
As students, we worked in restaurants which we enjoyed and decided to buy our own. We had a small place in Wiltshire for four years where our son and daughter were born, then we moved to surrey and bought a larger restaurant which we ran for sixteen years, we had many revues in national news papers and we were in all the food guides, making ours one of the top 120 restaurants in the country. After work I used to paint, sometimes all night. When we sold the restaurant I had an exhibition and sold most of my paintings
Now we live near Sarlat, in the valley of the Dordogne, where I can finally paint full time.
My paintings are figurative and are about flat shapes, movement and colour.

ERIK MICHEL