Michele Usibelli likes to shake things up. 

She studied and practiced architecture, but the field fell flat for her creatively. A marketing job taking travel writers to national parks led her to Utah and Alaska before she returned to her hometown of Seattle. She didn’t start painting until she was 38, after the birth of her second child. “Painting was something I always wanted to do, but I never had the time,” she says.

Now with collectors across the country, she limits herself to four workshops a year and a couple of plein air events, saving most of her time for painting solo on location and in the studio. And she refuses to repeat herself. “People will see a painting that’s sold and they’ll want you to do the same painting again, but I lose my energy and my excitement if I do it twice,” she says.

“A Riot of Color” (oil, 14 x 7 in.)

PUSHING PAST THE PALETTE

Rainy Seattle weather taught her to look for subtlety. “Being in Seattle, a lot of times when you go out, it’s gray, or layer upon layer of green,” she says. Her challenge is restraint: “I love color so much that I can overdose on it in my paintings.” So she saves her strongest color for the focal point and lets everything else gray down toward the edges. “As you move out toward the perimeter of my paintings, everything starts to gray down so that the eye stays in the center of interest,” she says.

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Her surfaces match that approach. Inspired by the late Kent Lovelace’s copper panel paintings, she tones her panels with golden acrylic, then scratches into the paint with a brush handle. “I leave a lot of little areas and edges of that warm gold shining through, enough to seem like it’s glowing from the inside,” she says.

“Afternoon Stroll” (oil, 20 x 16 in.)

LOOSE, BUT BUILT ON DRAWING

Underneath it all is a solid drawing. “You can have the most beautiful paint application,” she says, “but if your drawing is off, the viewer’s eye will always go to what’s wrong and won’t ever look past it.” Once the drawing is right, she can play. “Painting is a process of losing and finding, then losing again and finding,” she says. “It’s like a tide coming in and out.”

Michele Usibelli

BRINGING PLEIN AIR HOME

To keep studio work from going stiff, Usibelli splits her time evenly between plein air and studio painting. “Spending time at both is the only way to fine-tune your art,” she says.

In the studio, she paints from photos at the same pace she would on location, stops when her time outdoors would have run out, and, when working on several paintings, paints one from life after each. “My goal is to have a seamless transition between my studio and plein air work, always,” she says.

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