Michelle Caplan
Michelle was freelancing from home, doing Graphic Design, and started doing the art as a side thing. She never thought she could be a full time artist.
Michelle Caplan loves the stories that she can tell from her artwork she researches out discarded photos and create stories of who she imagines the people may have been. Caplan gathers clues from the images, clothing and surroundings. She makes assumptions and likes to take guesses.
Clients give her their photos and tell her all about the subject, which have ranged from grandparents to children, to pets. They are very excited to have a personal piece made. Caplan says customer’s enthusiasm drives to hunt for the perfect papers and items for their pieces. The opportunity is to create a narrative for someone’s personal photo gives my work a completely different dimension. Her work is a beautiful combination of collage and assemblages her work is mostly inspired by old vintage photographs and things she has found from flea markets and bargain sales. She finds these old photos and the people in them are the inspiration. Her work is based on forgotten history and it is up to her imagination to create a story about a person in the photograph. She believes that there is an endless possibility which is what makes her work so interesting and inventive.
Michelle uses a lot of different media in her work such as photographs, fabric swatches, newspaper clippings and other ephemera.
Those images are precious to her and she can’t imagine her family photographs in a box for strangers to rummage around. She combines her passion for family history and often makes pieces on commission.
she talks about how she can spend hours seeking good photographs because old snapshots are plagued by sunspots, fingers on the lenses, double exposures or the takers own shadow. She picks ones of people you think you would like to know.
One of her famous quotes is “To me, the collage captures