BIOGRAPHY
Brooklyn based painter, Michelle Jackson Mannix, has been developing her painting practice for 20 plus years alongside her passion for food and design, where she spent 16 years creating, and running three culinary businesses.
Also a culinary educated and trained professional cook, she discovered the distinct similarities between cooking and abstract expressionism. She dove into that connection enabling her work to obtain more freedom, rhythm and expression. This expansive way of painting solidified her style as she began to embark on painting full time.
While raised in a military family, living in 6 states by the time she was 13 when they settled in Virginia, she is proud to consider herself a New Yorker having lived here longer than anywhere else. This juxtaposition of connecting to a place and not being from one comes through in her art work in the chaos of the ever present line work under and over the paintings.
CV
STATEMENT
An intuitive process informs my work and my identity as an artist. Bold colors and gritty, layered textures provide language for my subconscious. I use highly gestural marks, line work, and brush strokes to evoke emotion and movement within my work.
My focus and style is abstract expressionism painting and collage. My mediums are acrylic, pencil and oil sticks and I love to work on found objects and wood. I’m deeply inspired by artists Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Kerry James Marshall, and Jean-Michel Basquiat in addition to artist friends of mine across all mediums.
I find in all forms I find myself in the doing, and the act of painting is more important to me than the final work. When I lose myself in the process of creation – letting my intuition take over where thinking stops – my inner landscape can be expressed in the outer where words often fail. I seek to express the subconscious as a way of processing feelings, grief and trauma – to let them take a new form in the outer. Transformed. Healed. Released.
