Artist Statement and Bio

Michelle is an award-winning Contemporary Expressive Abstract Artist living and working in Gurnee, Illinois — a suburb of Chicago. Her home studio is “up close and personal,” occupying her living and dining room space which, Michelle says, allows her to seize fleeting creative inspiration the moment it strikes.

Primarily a painter, Michelle embraces a mixed-media approach, continually exploring how different materials and processes interact. In addition to paints, brushes, and mediums, her studio is alive with tools of exploration — a vast collection of ephemera, mark-making implements, stencils, stamps, and fibers — all within arm’s reach.

Michelle draws inspiration from the post-war avant-garde female artists of the mid-century such as Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler — women who boldly redefined what painting could be. Like them, her work is deeply intuitive and gestural, rooted in emotion and movement. Through her process, she explores the intersection of chaos and order, spontaneity and design — allowing each painting to evolve as a visual record of energy, rhythm, and the layered complexity of human experience.

Presently, Michelle’s work focuses on rich layers and tactile surfaces as she builds modern abstract works on wood panels and semi-abstract florals on both wood and canvas. Using a variety of mediums, her paintings tell visual stories that bridge the seen and unseen worlds — evoking emotion, memory, and the energetic connections that bind us to nature and to one another. Each piece is a journey of transformation, inviting the viewer to pause, reflect, and rediscover the extraordinary within the ordinary.