Mireille Zagolin: artist of dreams and of tangible beauty.

 

Born in 1958, Mireille Zagolin grew up in the Swiss Alpine valleys.  As a child the local band and the village dances fed her imagination.  Everything was interesting, everything worth remembering.  The first outlet for her creativity was the garden, where she would mould the clay with her hands.  Fiercely independent, she moved out at a young age and settled on the shores of Lake Geneva.  Never dreaming she would one day be an artist, she found a job, met her future husband and had a son with him.

 

Painting took Mireille rather by surprise.  A friend talked her into following a silk-painting course, and that struck a spark.  Art became a real passion and, learning by doing, she turned out painting after painting, landscapes and nudes, on silk at first, then on canvas.  After a time, dispensing with models, she started to express her own inner world.  Though often dreamlike, it was a world firmly rooted in the beauty of tangible reality.

 

After 15 years of painting, Mireille felt a need to move into three dimensions and let her hands forge a deeper acquaintance with the human body, so long a source of fascination.  In 2005 she opened her sculpture atelier in Nyon, and human forms began to take shape, feminine for the most part, in clay or bronze, and with the sensual curves she so loves to exaggerate.  Yet she never stopped painting. What emerged were standing or semi-reclining figures, viewed from behind in low-backed dresses, in hues of red and pink or tinged with a tender blue; and whether painted or sculpted, Mireille’s women may be introspective or outgoing, while others are shown in a bending, loving gesture. Sketches rather than portraits, they are at times dreamy, almost visionary, always generous of feeling, delicate yet solid.  At other times the artist plays with layers of paint in abstract canvases, as though turning for strength towards the mountains she sprang from: there is a mysterious mineral quality to these, light but at the same time unyielding, with barely perceptible figures moving just beneath the surface.

 

For inspiration Mireille looks to real life and the human body, which she loves with a passion.  The feminine, encounters, love and the body in motion are recurring motifs.  Yet for such a spiritual soul the merely terrestrial is not enough, and her latest pictures are airier, with more white space.  They breathe, beckoning to us to step into that space, that luminous whiteness where anything is possible.

 

Cheerful and enthusiastic, Mireille loves to share her creations with her audience - online, at her atelier and at exhibitions.