About

Alison Michaela (b. Brisbane) is an Australian, mixed media artist influenced by memories of theatrical performance and music.

Exclusive Clouds: Paintings by Alison Michaela

Essay by Cintra Wilson

In the liminal spaces between surrealism, abstraction, and gestural painting, there is a palatial theater that exists only in the mind of Alison Michaela, where matter and sound seem to physically combine on an atomic level. Michaela, who trained and performed extensively as a classical violinist, has a kind of synesthetic relationship with music — a kinetic empathy that emanates through her brushes into lyrical strokes and swooshes that evoke the kind of ghostly energies that might linger onstage after a performance by Degas ballerinas.  The auditory becomes physicalized; arabesques and arpeggios become controlled curves.  Faces morph into orchestral reveries. Gentle eyes peer out from a soft violence of painterly tornadoes.  Gowns swirl until the dancer dissolves within them. 

The results are poetic and dramatic, intimate and interior; her works are an exquisitely civilized dive into the primordial ooze, but still reveal deep emotions with a distinctly feminine quality.  Like a Brontë novel, Michaela’s work translates boundless emotional fugues through a reserved delicacy of control.

In the “Exclusive Clouds” series, Michaela’s soft-spoken personality and expertly curated musical headspace erupts into surges of complex, dramatic feeling and transformation. These works resemble a fusion of the works of British artist Glenn Brown, CBE, whose figurative elements emerge out of a chaos of line-work, and Janna Watson’s lush, feminine riots of painterly abstraction, the “moments” of which emphasize the materiality of the paint itself.  Michaela’s technique of “finding” the features inside of an abstract burst of movement on a simple plain becomes an elegant language through which she describes the ineffable.

In Ride inside the Hurricane, the voyeurism of looking out from within a tangle of music is in itself its own “ride.” The eyes caught up in the swirling lavender energies are questioning, vulnerable, droll; one gazes up in a way that equally suggests the suffering of Christ crucified, and a sarcastic teenaged eyeroll.  The impasto appearance of the storm offers a kind of Rorschach-test, leaving the viewer to decide how benign this emotional weather system really is.

In The Violinist, one of Michaela’s most autobiographical works, the player is portrayed as being transported not just by the music, but as merging into the music itself into a near infinity-loop.  The tenderness in the musician’s eye suggest that the beauty of the composition she plays moves her into a new surrealist realm. 

The Impasse of Reverie, one of Michaela’s more figurative paintings, shows a Renaissance-like face whose mouth is not articulated; the reverie she inhabits is a state which cannot be expressed with words. The  palpable vulnerability in the eyes of the character also conveys a kind of quiet exaltation, redolent of the loneliness of the long-distance runner (or perhaps, like Michaela herself, the elevated isolation of a concert soloist.)

An entirely different mood is achieved in I Miss the Gloria, wherein a gestural swoop yields what almost resembles a partial Venetian mask. The blue face and eye seems to be processing the acceptance phase of grief and loss, even as the muted green background threatens to overwhelm the image entirely — the banality of everyday living, as it were, allowing little time for such private moments of nostalgia. 

In Proscenium, Michaela turns away from her tornadoes of music and gives us a silhouette that suggests a 19th century actress is preparing backstage to perform her role before the limelight.  There is, again, the theme of an artistically exalted solitude; backstage, the character is not entirely articulated, unlike the winsome, realistically-rendered features that peer out of Michaela’s gestural hurricanes. Here, Michaela captures the pause of breath before the actress plunges into the defining act of creation.

In Arietta, the actress seems to appear onstage; here, she is subsumed by her role in the act of performance, almost dissolving into the greenery of the set piece behind her.  This piece showcases Michaela’s ability to transmit an innate elegance through her abstractions. 

Shades of Francis Bacon (one of Michaela’s great influences) are found in the fleshy energies and colors of Sonic Tempest, one of Michaela’s more carnal works; here, instead of the body turning into music, the music appears to be caught in the act of becoming an entwined couple, who, if left to evolve, might emerge dancing. 

Another dramatic play of light and color occurs in Holographic Master of Ceremonies; here, Michaela envisions a three-dimensional light figure in two dimensions, with a rare display of wit.  The light beams are not so much a transformative vehicle, like Michaela’s storms of music -  they are the source of life itself for the hologram. 

It is a piece that asks personal questions of artists in general — whether or not they are in fact created by their spotlights. 

In another of Michaela’s more Francis Baconish creations, Cadenza, the figure on a rounded stage resembles an anthropomorphic musical note.  The cadence is a personality; its direct stare is empowered, if not confrontational.  This image speaks to the power of art itself.

In one of Michaela’s more literal works, Meeting a Shadow, a seated woman is beautiful while faceless; the lines of her barely-articulated form suggest she is demure and refined, and yet entirely remote. In Michaela’s deeply observant way, she describes in this figure the uncertainty of connecting with people, clad as vaguely they are in perceptions about themselves and intentional first impressions. 

Michaela’s drawings further her themes of theatricality,  transformation, and connection. In Scheherazade,  They Seek Him Here, They Seek Him There, Tectonic and Three Quarters of a Thought, Michaela again explores the Venetian mask shape, this time to explore ideas of persona.  A cubist fragmentation occurs in these faces, offsetting the realism of their eyes, describing once again how difficult it is to know the complexities of other people, their stories, and their suffering. Scheherazade’s steely gaze, however, assures us that however fragmented she may appear, her art ensures that she is entirely in control. 

Michaela is masterful in her ability to convey such complex interior states and transformations through such an economy of lines, the grace of her hand, and the sophistication of her color palette.  As Anne Sexton once wrote in The Kiss, “Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.”