Artsy Shark is please to present the newest featured artist Michelle Hunter, who presents her “Brain Series” Visit Michelle’s art blog for detailed descriptions of her artwork and creative process.
Michelle Hunter is a representational, symbolic, intimate, calm and intense visual artist. In a recent painting, a brain is done as wires to represent the connections needed to spark a memory. Another piece included scrambled images of the brain on rubix cubes, illustrating that we are fully in control only when we train our minds to be present. Her work places concepts into a visual context.
Her current Brain Series deconstructs familiar themes related to how our brains function. This Series presents opportunities for scientific learning and conceptual visual challenges. The painting “Don’t You Remember?” shows the concept of the brain and memory with the brain painted as wire. “Present, Past, Future or Dreaming” uses rubix cubes to represent how our minds are in flux, but being present is where the brain, your mind, is of most use or at its near full potential.
After connecting that her migraines happened when a day went by without coffee, Michelle painted “Caffeine Headache” with a throbbing brain causing a coffee cup to crack. She addresses ones motivation to drink and what parts of our brain are most impacted by alcohol in her painting “First Aid.”
While our bodies are at rest when asleep, Michelle’s “Zzzzzzz (Sleep)” painting highlights what parts of our brain are most active during sleep. The latest painting in Michelle’s Brain Series is of the brain and music “Brain Rhythm” where the painting is of a speaker. Within the speaker is the brain in its center showing what parts this organ is active when reading, listening or playing music. The brain, surrounded by wavy sheet music, shows through the black mesh painting across the canvas.
The majority of her artwork is in the medium of acrylic paint on stretched canvas. Using a painterly technique, Michelle transforms everyday objects with a subtle unexpected surreal approach. Her color palette consists of mostly warm colors, punctuated with bright and dramatic tones. Outside of the Brain Series, Michelle’s paints herself in “Moon Eye” using some bright colors as if the image of her was a film negative.
Michelle originally thought she would paint her eye as is, but quickly realized that the negative image tones of something that is black/dark brown would be something very light. This lead Michelle to paint her eye as the moon. In “My Cell to Unlock,” Michelle addresses her struggle with self-expression with words by painting jail bars inside her mouth with the key hanging behind the bars. “Embracing Essential Weaknesses: From dead to alive” shows a large tear helping a plant to grow through a crack in concrete.
Art has been an integral part of Michelle’s life. Since childhood she has been practicing art. Born and raised in Washington Heights, in the borough of Manhattan, Michelle is a native New Yorker of Trinidadian and Iranian descent. She is also an alumnus of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia School of Music and Art. Currently, Michelle Hunter lives and works in Inwood, Manhattan.
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