Featured Artists: Melissa Michelle Chimera & Georgia Michalicek
Featured Cover Artist: Melissa Michelle Chimera
Melissa Michelle Chimera is a Honolulu native of Filipino and Lebanese ancestry, who moved to Honoka‘a almost a year ago with her husband and son. Melissa studied natural resources management at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She spent the first part of her career as a conservationist, working for The Nature Conservancy and National Park Service, preserving endangered species on Maui—plants and animals otherwise unknown to the world—which she now interprets as a painter.
Initially Melissa began painting to bring awareness to forgotten native Hawaiian birds, flowers, and trees, reflecting, “The kama‘āina unknown to even those like myself who were born and raised here.” For Melissa, this desire to discover and bring forward truth as an ethical observer now extends to other subjects like invasive species in Hawai‘i, the global refugee crisis, immigrants (like her Filipino grandparents who were sugarcane field workers) and those discarded by war. Melissa says, “I use the formal qualities of painting (surface, subject, color) to convey matters that in my mind are reaching a crisis point.”
Melissa has always painted in oils; however, the mediums she uses have changed over time. These substances range from fast-drying Liquin to old-fashioned slow-drying high gloss resins like Venetian turpentine. Her canvas of choice is linen, where she leaves part of the canvas unpainted to show the weave of the fiber. She recreates painted damask patterns that appear like woven fabrics, a reference to her Lebanese ancestors who were immigrant tailors working in cotton mills at the turn of the 20th century. Melissa is now interested in textiles and paper/canvas/beading appliques, including her wedding dress and veil currently on view in her solo show Migrant, at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The paintings incorporate her genealogy as the granddaughter of immigrants by situating the individual and group portraits among native and introduced species.
Melissa hopes to continue exhibiting locally and abroad. She says, “My favorite projects have been collaborative. Inheritance: Land and Spirit, for example, is a painting-poetry collaboration with my mother, poet Adele Ne Jame, for the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. She curated and participated in The Far Shore, about the Arab immigrant experience last year for the Arab American National Museum.”
Museums are Melissa’s food and water. She shares, “I need them like air to breathe in order to see materials and subject matter with which artists are experimenting. The kernel of an idea usually evolves with a great deal of research and reading. A thought-provoking image or idea can come from anywhere—hiking in the forest, on the street—but it usually needs to percolate a while before it matures and comes together.”
Melissaʻs work can be found on her website as well as at Tiffany’s Art Agency in Hawi.
For more information: melissachimera.com
Table of Contents Artist: Georgia Michalicek
Georgia Michalicek moved to Hawai‘i Island in 2018 from Sedona, where she specialized in southwest landscape photography. She has shown her photographs in several galleries and juried art exhibitions in Arizona, winning a variety of awards. She was honored to display a solo exhibit of her work entitled Joyful Elements at the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix, AZ, where she also served as an art curator.
Georgia’s focus, no matter the location, is to become aligned with the energy of a place while creating her compositions before she clicks the shutter on her Nikon D600 camera. Her new home in East Hawai‘i offers the perfect combination for her fine art photography of the four elements—earth, air, fire, water—and sacred places.
For more information: facebook.com/RawElementsPhoto
