Artist Biography
Alison Michaela is an Australian, mixed media artist based in Sydney. Her work reflects imagined experiences prompted by the memory of music and theatrical performance. She also explores physical sensations that occur in response to emotive music. Her figurative compositions merge the ideas of surrealism, expressionism and abstraction whilst bridging the techniques of drawing and painting.
Statement
My work is influenced by the memory of music and theatre and my training as a classical violinist.
I am deeply inclined towards the inner world of thoughts, ideas and memories. I draw from my formative experiences in music and theatre. From an early age I collected theatre programmes filled with sketches of period costumes and set designs that have had a palpable influence on my compositions. In a theatrical setting the inner, imaginative world is championed.
Alison Michaela
Interview
CINTRA WILSON : How did you experience art growing up?
ALISON MICHAELA: When I was five or six I began attending a Russian music school. It was essentially early music development in the beginning - playing recorder, singing, rhythmic clapping. Eventually you choose an instrument to learn and for me it had to be the violin. When I was taught how to play expressively, my teacher would describe the musical themes as characters. A pleasant, lyrical theme became a princess or a fairy. Something more weighted and low registered would become a troll or goblin. I really became attuned to the way music creates pictures in your mind. My drawings provided a means to externalise these thoughts.
I also experienced opera at an early age and I remember noting the unusual way in which the characters interacted. I thought, well, this seems closer to the way I feel sometimes! How come life isn't like this? I can seem quiet, but I’m secretly drawn to extreme emotional states. I love experiencing that from a safe distance through music and theatre. There’s an adrenaline that comes from dramatic music.
CINTRA WILSON: My Mother's a musician, and my Father would always ask her "What's playing in your head right now?" And she would always give the answer right away: “Schubert!” She would know. Are you the same way? Do you have a constant soundtrack in your head?
ALISON MICHAELA: I really relate to that. More often than not music accompanies my thoughts. Music has been such a major part of my life that I’ve internalised it. I grew up with classical training but halfway through my music degree I wanted to break loose and hang out with the jazz students. I started writing jazz arrangements for string trios and working with jazz singers. I enjoyed escaping certain rigidities of classical music, going off the beat seeking a freedom of expression. A jazz audience can shriek or clap during a performance. I love how that activity becomes part of the music.
CINTRA WILSON: Your drawings are really beautiful, really accomplished. You can tell that it's something you really relate to. What’s your process in the studio?
ALISON MICHAELA: Quite commonly I start with drawing. I found Edgar Degas' work meaningful in this respect because he was particularly excited by drawing. Towards the end of his life his drawing output even overtook his paintings. He used coloured pastels as a way of applying bright, solid colours into his drawings without using paint. I also liked the way he used tinted paper. It's a great time saver. With a full time job I try to be as efficient as possible in the studio.
CINTRA WILSON: What are you doing as a full time job?
ALISON MICHAELA: I work as a user experience designer. I've deliberately shifted my career from music to something closer to visual design. I went to the Queensland Conservatorium for my university education.
CINTRA WILSON: You were a Conservatory dweeb!
ALISON MICHAELA: Violin performance was my major. I played in solo and orchestral settings but I also enjoyed the smaller chamber music format for which I wrote arrangements for our string trio and quartet.
CINTRA WILSON: Rhapsodic works like Ravel’s quartet come to mind. I'm thinking of how exquisite they are and how fun they must be to play.
ALISON MICHAELA: Yes! It’s a great communal activity to be so in tune with the musicians you're working with. You develop a kind of creative telepathy.
CINTRA WILSON: How does music relate to painting for you?
ALISON MICHAELA: As a musician you’re trained to project the emotion of the music all the way to the last seat in the auditorium. When I’m drawing, however, I can get a little too focused on the details. I relate to the way Degas experimented with monotypes. He would ink up a glass plate and use things like rags to swipe away the paint, revealing a composition that's more open to chance effects. He would come back to these works later, adding colour and tonal detail with pastels or essence. I liked that idea of working with something more haphazard. I feel less restrained when I’m creating something to respond to rather than drawing very deliberately.
There’s a sense of movement and energy I like to bring out. When I work with sponges and rags I create charged, abstract structures. Then I bring out suggestions of figures and faces with finer pieces of charcoal, or pastel pencils.
CINTRA WILSON: In terms of ‘the nudist and the chemist’ - you're definitely more of a ‘chemist’. Wouldn't you say?
ALISON MICHAELA: Maybe I'm a ‘chemist’ at heart who throws in a bit of ‘nudist’.
CINTRA WILSON: It could be Appollonian and Dionysian if you want to think about it in poetic terms but Nudist and Chemist works fine! What else influences your work, besides music?
ALISON MICHAELA: I'm drawn to philosophical topics.
CINTRA WILSON: Anyone in particular? Who do you read?
ALISON MICHAELA: Well, I just recently finished something on Epictetus and Stoicism.
CINTRA WILSON: I can totally see you reading that for fun.
ALISON MICHAELA: I prefer taking deep dives into a topic rather than skimming the surface. I've always been deeply fascinated by writers talking about their craft - how they reflect, refine and rewrite. The other day I was re-reading Virginia Woolf's, 'A Room of One's Own'.
CINTRA WILSON: People keep giving that to me. I mean, it's been given to me maybe six or seven times. I just find it funny that people keep imposing it on me.
ALISON MICHAELA: One thing I like about her writing is the way she narrates her thoughts. All of a sudden she'll be interrupted by something like a cat walking past and in that moment she's lost her train of thought and she's back in the real world again.
CINTRA WILSON: I can relate to that so hard.
ALISON MICHAELA: I relate to writers who have captured the feeling of interior thought in some way. I find it interesting to consider the similarities between reading and listening to music. For both, the action takes place in your mind. They both create interior worlds and individual responses. Everyone imagines something slightly different. I've always enjoyed really vivid experiences in my mind through the influence of music. I’m interested in being aware of the interior worlds of others and making that a shared experience. The intersections of art, music and literature provide access to these worlds that we characterise as being different from reality.
CINTRA WILSON: You have a very specific palette. There's something contemporary about your stuff. For instance, what kind of furniture do you like? It seems like there's maybe a particular era you like. I can't quite put my finger on it.
ALISON MICHAELA: Oh, that's an interesting association to make. I do have a great love of early films like, 'The Philadelphia Story', movie musicals, Judy Garland...
CINTRA WILSON: 'Philadelphia Story' is in my top five!
ALISON MICHAELA: Oh, put it right there!
CINTRA WILSON: Yeah, put it there. That's a stunning movie!
ALISON MICHAELA: It's got an edge to it. The dialogue is sharp. I guess I favour a retro aesthetic, perhaps harkening to the thirties and forties.
CINTRA WILSON: You know your palette looks like Hopper's palette to me.
ALISON MICHAELA: I have certainly been drawn to his work in the past, particularly around the subject of isolation in close proximity.
CINTRA WILSON: But I make the association here purely about colour. It seems like the colours that Hopper used were related to bakelite and vinyl; the stuff of that world such as the cars, upholstery and tabletops. They all had a particular sort of palette that became very much a part of Hopper's palette.
ALISON MICHAELA: I can see the colour associations with bakelite materials; those muted, avocado-green telephones.
CINTRA WILSON: It's the everyday objects of the time and the range of colours they used which were fairly muted, industrial colours.
So which artists from history are you most drawn toward?
ALISON MICHAELA: Besides Degas, forces that have influenced my experimental compositions come from my readings on Francis Bacon.
CINTRA WILSON: *beating chest*
ALISON MICHAELA: He enjoyed working with source material as a starting point but essentially found his composition by destroying and evolving the image directly on the canvas, in the moment.
If I start thinking too much it works against me. A certain mindset works best. I relate it to that moment when a bungee jumper leaps from their platform. I have to find that feeling - that nerve. I think, ‘I'm just going to start’, and by the end of the free-fall I step back and think, ‘Oh okay, I've got something here. I feel like I can work with this’. Then I’ll move into the more refined stage of my process.
CINTRA WILSON: How about contemporary artists? Who are you really into?
ALISON MICHAELA: Leslie Vance. Initially her work was more figurative - still life compositions which were quite apparent as still life. Over time she has really stretched that compositional paradigm. The figurative elements were pulled apart and manipulated until they became intriguing realms containing only the slightest suggestion of objects. Fragments - not enough for you to determine anything definite. She also creates interesting textural effects with her brush movements. Thixotropic qualities! You can see the sinews of the paint where the brush has passed through.
CINTRA WILSON: Thixotropic!
ALISON MICHAELA: I love that effect because the tracking of bristles through paint looks like the grooves of a vinyl record. The amplification of line work exhibits the vibrations of music and the physical energy it generates.
CINTRA WILSON: Classicism or romanticism? If I was going to take a guess I'd say you're totally divided between the two. I don't think you could choose.
ALISON MICHAELA: I feel very conflicted between the two! If I was forced to pick a side, I'd probably go with Romanticism. I'm really drawn to the idea that likens our emotional experience to nature - all those iconic, romantic paintings of nineteenth Century figures standing on cliffs, looking out into the vast wilderness.
CINTRA WILSON: Do you like the Bronte sisters?
ALISON MICHAELA: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's kind of wild really. Who doesn't want to be out on a moor being windswept? And yet, in reality I often feel a sense of inhibition. It's an aspect of my personality. I have all this drama going on on the inside, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from an external vantage point.
CINTRA WILSON: Still waters running rhapsodic!