Mickayel Thurin
Mickayel Thurin shares insights and connects with the writers of SHOUTOUT LA in this feature, click the link below to read more:
"...what do you want your legacy to be?
I want my legacy to be that I sparked a deeper awakening in people—encouraging them to embrace their most authentic selves and fully engage with the present moment. Through my art, I aim to stir emotions, disrupt autopilot living, and connect people to the raw truth of their experience. I want to be remembered for speaking my truth unapologetically and living in alignment with my highest timeline—honest, intentional, and at peace on purpose. In 50 years, I hope people will say I illuminated a mindset that empowered others to become their best selves and live with greater awareness and love. And if I didn’t achieve that, I hope they’ll say I embodied it in my own life..."
“Painting beautiful people and things in beautiful light, indeed finding almost every moment of perception a candidate for this beauty, I wonder if a certain fidelity to the ever-renewed ripening of an orchard through all its necessary stages of metamorphosis isn’t an analogy for the privilege of painting.”
- Scott Noel, The Apples of Pomona, 2024 catalog
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Apples of Pomona, an exhibition of new works by Scott Noel showcasing a vibrant array of new oil paintings and several acrylic and pastel works on rag board. Each painting is alive with Noel’s spirited intention to, “vary and reconfigure painting’s visual eloquence to express the beauty of the world”. While the small to medium-sized paintings range in subject from the nude to still-life and landscape, the exhibition is anchored by three monumental, multi-panel figure compositions that demonstrate Noel’s devotion to layered narratives, sophisticated color mixing and his signature painterly touch.
Gross McCleaf Artist Mickayel Thurin discusses her studio practice with TK Smith, Assistant Curator: Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation in The Scream: Self-Portraiture That Expresses Universal Emotions at GMG. In this video, Thurin discusses her personal biography, developing a distinctive style, meaning in materials and formation of the figure, all the while exploring the almalgamation of emotions.
Click below to listen and watch this insightful dialogue unfold.
Elizabeth Johnson: Did you start painting portraits when you came to PAFA? Or did you enter school already drawing and painting people?
Mickayel Thurin: I've always loved portraiture. I used to draw from family photographs when I was six or seven, and I’d also draw people when someone would take the time to sit for me. Some kids like drawing animals or sunsets, for me it's people and their faces that sparks my interest, closely followed by color and pattern and texture. It has to do with the personality within a face. There’s so much going on with a person, and I understand them better through portraits than through conversation...
“…the idea that a shape/form can occupy multiple spatial conditions and potential readings keeps me engaged in both making and looking… a Duck/Rabbit thing, rooted in the complexities and pleasure of perception.”
-Michael Gallagher
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present, INFINITION, a solo exhibition of bold and colorful abstractions by Michael Gallagher.
Enigmatic, delightfully playful and bold, Gallagher’s new works at first appear as accomplished abstractions that reference modernist forms. Painted biomorphic shapes swirl around the surface, producing a centrifugal force generated from the center of the painting outward. Texture and varied paint application break the solidity of flat planes of color creating implied space in the composition. The shapes then alternately poke into those spaces and push out, shifting the relationship between what is considered the figure and what is the ground.