Education

1981 - 1986
École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), France
Master of Graphic Design/multimedia

Biography

Michele Guieu is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs de Paris (Master of Graphic Design and Multimedia), Paris, France. She is a recipient of the 2009 San Diego Art Prize in the Emerging Artists Category. Guieu recently had a solo exhibition at Art Produce Gallery and participated in shows at the California Center for the Arts, the Oceanside Museum of Art and the William Cannon Art Gallery. She will have a solo exhibition at Project X: Art in December 2010. Michele Guieu lives and works in San Diego.

More information

Michèle Guieu was born in Marseille, France, in 1962. Many times during her childhood she visited Spain and Italy, and when she was a teen she lived for several years in Senegal, Africa with her family. There, she discovered a completely different culture, the amazing beauty of the desert and the poverty in which most of the people lived. This unique and very powerful experience changed her life forever and gave her a new perspective on the world.

From her childhood Michele remembers visits to wonderful museums, hikes across beautiful landscapes, and always carrying with her something with which to draw or sketch. She was later educated in Paris, where she earned her Master Degree in Visual Communication from the ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris).

After graduating from ENSAD, Michele spent years working as a graphic designer for various companies and later as a freelance designer. During this time she continued to travel to countries like Russia, England, Mexico, French Caribbean, Algeria and Greece. In 1991 she concertedly turned her attention to her love for painting and in the following years exhibited her work in galleries and juried, collective exhibitions.

Michele gave art instruction to school teachers through a series of workshops and to children with social problems through “La Source,” an organization created and directed by the French painter Gerard Garouste.

Michele was afforded the rare opportunity to spend her summers in the mountains of southern France with teams of archeologists at a remote and primitive refuge, rediscovering the essentials of life. There, she sketched the rock engravings and painted a series of watercolors of the surrounding landscapes. These summers in the mountains inspired a collection of Michele’s work that was later exhibited at the Museum of Archeology in the Vallee des Merveilles near Nice, France. In the years following, Michele continued to exhibit her work in Paris, Lyon, and Le Mans, sometimes working “live” on large canvases in front of the people in the street.

Michele’s interest in petroglyphs and ancient cultures found her traveling often to the southwest United States. In 1998, 1999 and 2000, she traveled to New Mexico to visit various native, archeological sites and to work in a printmaking studio at the College of Santa Fe. It was there that she discovered many interesting techniques that now play a very important role in her painting.

It was also in New Mexico that she met her husband and made the decision to more permanently move to the U.S. While later living in Austin, Texas, she pursued the printmaking experience at Flatbed Studio and continued to incorporate these techniques into her work on canvas. After moving frequently throughout the United States, Michele now calls San Diego her home.

She and her family go frequently to the surrounding deserts, where she takes lots of pictures which now take a large place in her artwork. She recently developed a series of digital works based on these photos. She keeps painting at the same time, developing one of her favorite theme: the relation between people and spaces, working on portraits and elements of almost abstract landscapes. She also develops a new body of artwork based on her interest of what is going on in the world, like the portrait she made in January while French Colombian Ingrid Betancourt was hostage of the FARC.