Ali Cavanaugh Modern Fresco Paintings

Modern Fresco Paintings is the first collection of Ali Cavanaugh's paintings, and it follows her entire career using wate₍rcolor on kaolin clay to create her modern fresco technique and the lovely work that flows from it. Beginning with her hyper-realistic portraits and ending with her latest, more free-flowing pictures, her use of light, color, and the human form captures the essence of her models and their forms and feelings in a particular moment.0Cavanaugh's artistic sensibility was developed by two important events in her childhood. Her dependence on the visual world began when she lost much of her hearing through spinal meningitis when she was two, and her creative spirit developed out of her being raised in a rural environment where she had to create her own ways of expressing herself and making her own fun. "At the age of two, artist Ali Cavanaugh survived a bout of spinal meningitis, emerging relatively unscathed except for the near-total loss of her sense of hearing. What might have been a bitter sentence for a child turned out to be a lifelong blessing in disguise, instilling in Cavanaugh a singular sensitivity to the unspoken expressions that spark body language and the feelings that lie just beneath the mask of the human face. Modern Fresco Paintings charts Cavanaugh's boldest explorations yet into illustrating the interior space of thought. The more than one hundred fifty full-color images displayed here are the results of a unique process where multiple baths of watercolor are layered with synthetic brushes atop a wet clay surface and then sheathed in ultraviolet coating--an homage to the ancient art of fresco painting done with contemporary materials. The luminous portraits that emerge from these stacks of color penetrate through the visible layers to reveal the unseen truths behind their subjects' external features and expressions. Ali Cavanaugh is a painter whose work has appeared on book covers and in publications including Time, the New York Times Magazine, American Art Collector, and the Huffington Post. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri."--