FeaturesOctober 13, 2017
Nationally-recognized artist Ali Cavanaugh takes fresh approach with frescoes
Painter Ali Cavanaugh has a studio on the second floor of a downtown Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, building, which has made a name for itself as the first brick building ever constructed west of the Mississippi. Inside "The Old Brick" house, Cavanaugh displays her talents, with clay fittingly at the core...
Painter Ali Cavanaugh has a studio on the second floor of a downtown Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, building, which has made a name for itself as the first brick building ever constructed west of the Mississippi.
Inside "The Old Brick" house, Cavanaugh displays her talents, with clay fittingly at the core.
She's made a name for herself with her modern fresco works, which are watercolor on a kaolin clay surface.
She credits daughters Niamh and Saoirse as muses who provide the mystique in many of her works. Niamh first provided a source of hidden emotions in her hyper realism that began in 2007, and Saoirse a fountain of angelic, dreamy qualities, in her latest chapter, an impressionism style she has personally coined "immerse." It's a new chapter she began in 2015, walking a fine line between reality and mirage, with sharp facial features sometimes bleeding into the peripherals, much like passing clouds with moments of clarity.
It's a style that has appealed to many, with Cher buying three of her frescoes, Time magazine commissioning her to paint Taylor Swift for a cover and attracting 120,000 followers on Instagram.
A 1991 graduate of De Soto High School, Cavanaugh has a natural eye for portraits, enhanced at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she attended on a full-ride scholarship.
She says a partial hearing loss at age 2 from spinal meningitis may have honed her eye.
"It made me more dependent on my sight and reading body language and being more attentive to people because I have to completely focus to have a conversation," Cavanaugh says. "So I think that is kind of the underlying thing in my life that always has made me gravitate toward figures and the emotion of the figure."
Oil paints were her medium when she opened an art school and taught portrait painting in Grand Rapids, and continued to be when she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to gain traction as a professional artist. Married with two kids, she found herself devoted to the job of Mom, occasionally taking oil paintings to galleries on renowned Canyon Road in the hope of her work being displayed for purchase. The response was lukewarm. There were some memorable moments, like the time actor Gene Hackman came to her home and requested an oil painting of her dog. She complied.
However, it was a mentor she befriended who helped her sharpen her divided artistic focus, which had included areas like sewing and interior design. It coincided with a chance bartering situation. A man installing windows at her house saw her oil paintings and expressed his admiration. Cavanaugh saw an opening for some additional work she desired -- a courtyard area. A deal was struck; she would do a portrait of the man's family in return for the courtyard. There was just one catch -- the man's wife had a preference for watercolor.
"And I thought, 'I can do it. I'll figure it out. Go for it,'" Cavanaugh said. "And I had never done watercolor."
She had dabbled with the medium but not professionally. Her faith in her skills and understanding of colors kept her from being intimidated.
She stuck to her methods, using a photograph for reference, and both portrait and courtyard were achieved.
Intrigued, she experimented on another piece of art paper she cut into three pieces, and the painting received positive feedback from her mentor. She decided to frame the watercolors and include them in a show the two decided to host in Austin, Texas, putting them with about 15 of her oil paintings.
"Maybe about three or four oil paintings sold, but everyone was flocked around these watercolors," Cavanaugh said. "People were just staring at them and it's just, like, what everyone wanted to talk about. It was just so obvious this was the direction I needed to go."
She made that decision on the drive back to Sante Fe, and work began on a portfolio with which she could approach galleries on Canyon Road. "I couldn't get any interest with my oil paintings on Canyon Road, but when I had the watercolors and took those, I mean, people's jaws were dropping," Cavanaugh said.
However, there was one recurring piece of feedback she heard from galleries: Her paintings were on paper; paper needed to be behind glass; art behind glass was not selling; find a way to remove the glass and her art would be marketable.
"When people saw something behind glass, it just read as a print," Cavanaugh said.
Determined, she started painting on plastered walls at her adobe home, and becoming intrigued with the fresco angle.
She researched materials and came across kaolin clay. She found a company in Austin, of all places, that made kaolin clay panels for watercolors.
She did several paintings on panels and took them to an art dealer in January of 2007. They quickly sold.
She was asked how many more could be supplied before the New York Affordable Art Fair in June of 2007.
Still trying to figure out the surface, she sent about eight paintings.
"It was nothing like paper," she said. "I had to start from scratch."
The paintings sold out at the show, with the request for more.
"I just started painting my heart out and painting 10 hours a day," Cavanaugh said.
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She posted her paintings on a blog on her website and feature stories from art magazines followed. Art galleries began calling.
"I started getting representation pretty quickly throughout the world really, at first it was in the country but then overseas," Cavanaugh said. "It snowballed. It snowballed big time."
Using the hyper realism style on clay, she began producing 75 paintings a year. They sold as quickly as she could paint.
"I think it boiled down to the oil paint, the medium itself was too heavy," Cavanaugh said. "It was too much emotion. When I got the whole new watercolor and put this whole new spin on it and made it light and airy and more spiritual ..."
Established in her art, Cavanaugh and her husband, Brett, moved with their two children, Niamh and Finn, to Ste. Genevieve in the summer of 2007. She had family in the region and always loved the town and its rich history.
"When we moved back to Ste. Genevieve that was like the best decision I ever made because it's so nice and quiet here," Cavanaugh said.
Her career was taking off with a presence in galleries in Sacramento; Los Angeles; Sante Fe; Austin; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Miami; Paris; Portugal; and Greece. One of her paintings made the cover of American Art Collector in 2009.
The family had two additions, Malachy in 2010 and Saoirse in 2012.
Life was moving fast -- too fast. She had four children and paintings that were becoming increasingly complex in colors and application along with refined techniques.
In 2014, Time magazine commissioned her to paint Swift, one of its eight finalists for Person of the Year. It would have appeared on the cover had Swift been chosen.
"It was never published because she didn't win," Cavanaugh said. The Ebola Doctors was though, and the painting remains in her possession.
The New York Times also contacted her, commissioning a portrait of Chavela Vargas, a famous Mexican artist, that did run.
In 2013, Niamh headed off to college. "She was my main muse for my whole painting career," Cavanaugh said. Niamh had been a quiet, shy subject, which inspired guarded, mysterious portraits with the face often hidden. Her inspiration departed, reality hit Cavanaugh in the face near the end of 2014: She was burned out on hyper realism.
"My work had always been evolving over all those years, hundreds, hundreds I painted," Cavanaugh said. "There was always some micro-evolution to keep me on my toes and excited about what I was doing. After that last painting I thought, 'This is it. There's no more magic here. I've figured it all out. There's no other mystery.'"
But there was Saoirse. The 2-year-old was a muse in waiting, the center of her mom's next phase, which she coined "immerse" painting.
"She really opened up a whole new world for me," Cavanaugh says about Saoirse.
Her immerse works debuted at the Art Hamptons in New York in July 2015, a traveling show on the East Coast that eventually ended in St. Louis.
"The new style, the immerse works, there's a conversation happening between me and the medium and the surface," Cavanaugh says. "I paint and then I just have to stare at it and it communicates back to me. 'What do I need to change? How do I need to shape this up?'"
With clay, nothing is permanent like paper, allowing for removal even when dried. It's a continual conversation, one that's hard to know when the final word is said.
"It makes it a lot harder, because you don't know when you're finished," Cavanaugh says.
She said the technique is different. The clay plates are larger, most 40 by 60 inches, and the figure has more direct eye contact than the hyper realism.
"My immerse paintings, the figure has more direct eye contact," Cavanaugh says. "On all those works I'm working on the face, the expression of that face."
She does commissions, but the style follows the inspiration of Saoirse.
"She kind of had this little sprite, little fairy kind of presence," Cavanaugh says.
Cavanaugh recently signed a contract with Unicorn Press for a 200-page hardcover art book, which will be out in about 18 months. It will be a 10-year retrospective of her work, and there's much work to include.
However, her biggest achievement is being able to pursue her passion.
"I'm making a living doing what I love to do, and not many people can do that," Cavanaugh says.
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