Still Life
Elegy & Vanitas
An Elegy is a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.
Vanitas is a genre of still life painting that uses symbolic objects to reflect on the transience of life and the inevitability of death. It reminds viewers that worldly beauty and material pleasures are fleeting.
As Michele moves through life, she continues to reflect on the difficult themes she is confronted with. Mortality is something many people rarely allow themselves to consider, yet Michele has been involuntarily drawn into its conversations through the many losses she has experienced. Over time, she has come to understand vanitas not only as a visual tradition but as a mindset — a way of seeing the world that extends far beyond drawing and painting. Her art is the elegiac expression of that perspective, which treats ordinary objects as witnesses to time, loss, and the slow erosion of meaning.
Death Becomes Him, a strangely psychic piece.
9" x 12" Oil on canvas panel
2025
I have spent most of my career as a landscape painter but had felt confined by the genre in 2025. I saw something in this wilting bouquet and decided to follow that inspiration. Little did I know, the last conversation I would have with my brother before he unexpectedly passed would occur as I applied the finishing touches to this piece. It is a strangely psychic painting that I've struggled with emotionally, yet the poetry of it reflects in the artistic choices displayed in the final piece.
A Perennial and An Annual, in memoriam of my brother.
20" x 16" Oil on stretched canvas
2025
Untitled Ruminative Still Life 1, contemplating my Dad’s passing
40" x 15"
Charcoal and Conte on cold pressed paper
2019
What many don't know is that I have an affinity for drawing still lifes. I've always been drawn to the symbology of vanitas and would often include common traditional vanitas imagery without understanding it as such. This is one of two vanitas drawings that I completed in the months after my dad passed away.
Untitled Ruminative Still Life 2, contemplating the loss of my parents
40" x 20"
Charcoal and Conte on cold pressed paper
2019
This is one of two vanitas drawings that I completed in the months after my dad passed away. I contemplated wisdom and knowledge in the wake of losing both of my parents to cancer. Ironically, at a time in my 20s when I needed their guidance through their passings.