Michele Poirier Mozzone has spent more than a decade exploring a subject that many artists would consider impossible to pin down: the constantly shifting relationship between light, water, and the human body. Working primarily in oil and pastel, the Massachusetts-based painter is best known for her “Fractured Light” series, a body of work inspired by a moment in 2011 when she watched her daughter swimming in a pool and became captivated by the ribbons of sunlight, distorted reflections, and fleeting shapes created beneath the water’s surface. What began as a single source of inspiration evolved into a long-running artistic investigation of movement, memory, and transformation.
Viewed from above, below, or somewhere in between, Mozzone’s swimmers seem suspended in a world where realism gradually dissolves into abstraction. Rather than simply depicting people underwater, she focuses on the visual disruptions caused by water itself, the fractured bands of light, warped anatomy, rushing bubbles, and shimmering reflections that turn ordinary moments into something almost dreamlike. Using photographs and underwater video footage as reference, she builds paintings that balance technical precision with painterly freedom, allowing distortion and color to become part of the story. The result is a collection of works that feel less like snapshots of swimming and more like studies of how water alters our perception of both the body and the passage of time.
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