By Stefene Russell
Photographs by Frank Di Piazza
On Michael Aaron McAllister’s to-do list for 2006: Eve, Coco Chanel, Richard Nixon, Charles Darwin, Anne Frank, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marie Antoinette and his mother ... but not necessarily in that order.
McAllister is a portrait artist with two degrees in ceramics. For years, his work was mostly busts (though for his graduate show, he cast 700 gray Windex “bottles”—some of which are still neatly stored on his kitchen shelves). But a fateful airline flight seven years ago diverted him from clay and kilns. McAllister hates to fly, and so carried onboard a few skeins of embroidery thread to stitch himself to distraction.
“So, I made this little piece,” he recalls. “It was totally horrific, but I thought, you know, I can continue my love affair with portraits. Why can’t these be drawings; why can’t all the work I do pass through the needle?”
In the past three years alone, McAllister’s had three solo gallery shows and landed spots in prestigious quilt exhibits. Since moms don’t teach their sons to quilt, he’s improvised to make the medium his own, even “signing” his work with embroidery on the back, an anomaly in this traditionally anonymous medium.
“And turn over the back ... see the stitches? That’s supposed to be clean,” he says. “Mine look like battlefields. I don’t hide that I’m quilting. I quilt with embroidery thread. The quilts are embroideries in a more formidable format.” Normally, he reads at least three biographies on each of his subjects; in Agatha Christie’s case, he read all of her novels.
“That took six months. I wanted to re-create the number of people who died in her books,” he says, “so it’s a collage of characters, and almost directions on how to kill somebody—the names go from blood-red to blood that’s oxidized, from light to dark.”
In his 6’ x 12’ attic studio, where he’s installed a DMC embroidery-floss store display that he scored for $35 (he drove six hours to pick it up), he keeps a written schedule of portraits running up to 2008. At the top of the ’07 list is “Titanic (The Last Supper),” which McAllister plans to finish on an upcoming Carnival cruise.
“It will be a menu of their last meal,” he says, “which was a drastic, Edwardian affair with 11 courses; the edges will look like dripping water.”
“Titanic” will show alongside Bonnie and Clyde and Mother Teresa in McAllister’s upcoming Saints and Sinners show (inspired by the Wilde quote “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”), scheduled to hang next year at the Thaddeus C. Gallery in LaPorte, Ind. Included will be a self-portrait with his late mother (“Everyone thinks their mom is a saint, of course.”) The prolific stitching he’ll do prepping for this show is yet another chance to practice his black-belt needlework skills.
“When people say, ‘Ooh, what machine made that?’” McAllister says, “I take it as a compliment.”
To see more of Michael Aaron McAllister's work, go to www.michaelaaronmcallister.com.
