Inspired by vintage wallpaper designs, Tess Michalik piles boldly colored oil paints into voluptuous layers of impasto, transforming delicate floral imagery with thick brushwork and palette knife marks that carry real material weight. Languid strokes animate each petal and leaf, recalling the sensuous ornamentation of the Rococo. Her work commits fully to the pleasure of its subject matter while moving confidently between abstraction and naturalism.
About her oil paintings Michalik writes: "Painting is a celebration of joy, anxiety, simple pleasures, decoration, ornamentation, and the material nature of paint." Her paintings, she says, are "small protestations to the drudgery of the mundane and the pain of existence — little love letters to the warm days of ecstasy that are captured by the autumn bouquet or the first blooming of the spring crocus, the first bit of purple to pop out of the snow."
Tess Michalik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Herron School of Art and her MFA from Northern Illinois University and has exhibited in regional institutions and galleries around the including the Maclean County Art Center in Bloomington, IL, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, and the Wonder Fair in Kansas. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts with two locations in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood