Michelle Gagliano is a fully sustainable artist based in Virginia. Gagliano's paintings offer an evocative response to the landscape, capturing the ephemeral qualities of nature and the shifting expanses of sea, land, and sky. She creates her own medium by grinding raw earth pigments, blending extracted nut oils, and infusing essential lavender-based solvents. This artisanal, sustainable approach reflects her deep connection to the environment.
S: What do you do and where do you work from?
M: I'm in Central Virginia. There are the Blue Ridge Mountains by us. It's incredibly beautiful, I have to say. I bought the land with my little painting money and built a home in the middle of it. So I have a studio at home because I prefer to work from home. I planted a big line of trees the same week as my son was born. I've always practised art. I don't remember a time when it wasn't in my life, even though I grew up on a farm. I was a farm child. So being surrounded by nature is normal to me. I love visiting cities, but I don't understand the concept of how to live in one. S: In what ways are you a sustainable artist? M: I'm an artist who practises sustainably. Really investigating the politics of materials is what I'm doing within my work. Really processing, really looking at everything. I had an exhibition last year in the birthplace of Raphael, where I was experimenting with a lot of different things, bringing Renaissance recipes up into our century, manipulating it, and seeing what I can do with it.
S: What is the method of your practice?
M: I like to work in a very focused, investigative manner. I've started to unpack this idea of learning about the materials, the colours, the recipes, and manipulating them. The question was how I could take that and transpose it into a modern context. I often wonder what the impact is of everything I touch, but also the greater dialogue about whether you're creating paintings from this Aristotelian point of view of science that they all had in the past, when we today approach everything from this Newtonian point of view. In the past, every colour had a very significant meaning. For contemporary artists, we really don't delve into that in the art schools.
S: So, you teach the implementation of sustainable practice in the fine artist's studio at Virginia Commonwealth University. You're an artist who's obviously very committed to sustainability. With consideration to waste in the art world, if an artwork doesn't go the way you want it to go, how do you rectify this? And what do you end up doing with that canvas?
M: I'm notorious for sanding things down and starting over with that, painting over the canvas. I find it really interesting to teach this class that I started. I introduce my students to different ways of approaching their artwork, to understand microplastics, and what we can do to reuse in art. You don't want to stifle creativity, but I want to encourage students to use up what they have. I try to lean them into this way of thinking, and hopefully, they will get curious. I want them to wonder what it is that makes a studio sustainable, but there's really no template, there's no existing dialogue. There are no rules. I find teaching this class helps me run a tighter studio.
S: You have previously said you work in total immersion. What does total immersion look like to you?
M: I love getting up very, very early. The best days are when I can get in my studio at five in the morning because I know I'm not going to be interrupted. So, I have this pocket of time, and the immersion is that silence of the morning. I find going through the physical movements of painting creates a calmness for me as I work on these pieces. I like the physicality of the work.
S: Is your painting process linear or constantly changing?
M: These paintings are reflective of life. You go in with a plan and I have an underdrawing. But then, like a metaphor for life, you can't control it beyond a certain point. I do have preconceptions, but then suddenly there's a give and take; this whole dialogue opens up between me and the work. I was classically trained, but it's much more difficult to learn about the letting-go process. It's the idea that you have to allow that chaos to happen a little bit.
S: What role do you think sustainability has in the future of the arts, and how much of a difference do you think that artists can make?
M: I think that as artists, we're the change makers. I think we have a really amazing, important role in what we do. I think we're the problem solvers. So how can you make sustainable work that is beautiful, evocative, and has a strong voice? A strong professional piece of art should hit the mark in all these areas. But we should also be challenged to produce art in a way that really looks at the politics of the material. I think that, as artists, we're the first to open that door and start the thinking process. I had a fabulous professor, Vernon Fisher was his name, and he always said, we're the antennas. You have to be the antenna of what's happening and I think that is important. It's not easy. I'm not saying that this is an easy thing. It is about trying to lean into it as much as you can. I read on the Gallery Climate Coalition website that we'd much rather have a thousand people leaning into it imperfectly than just one person doing it perfectly. It creates change and a different approach to a studio and to art.
S: The longer I look at your work, the more that comes out of it. Your art is a mixture of the past and present; they remind me of the grandeur of a theatrical Turner landscape, with Renaissance features such as the gold egg tempera, cut with a stark modernist abstraction. Are your works more inspired by the past or the future?
M: That's such a beautiful question. I think it's all of the above. I do love working with these recipes, creating my own paints, and really getting into the mechanism of art; that really harkens to my past. I was raised in this beautiful area of non-disposability; it's just natural for me to make my own paint. So, there is the past, but there's also the present sense of my current surroundings, and that being very accessible while I create. I am surrounded by inspiration. My palette shifts with the season. In my studio, I just open up all the doors, so I'm always immersed within the colours of landscape that change by the season. Thinking of the future tense, it's so interesting. No one's really ever asked me that. I think because of my intentionality with the materials, it's important that what I do now is for the future. Little by little, I create awareness about the future possibilities of preserving the landscape.
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