Ali Cavanaugh

The far-reaching effects of childhood illness and an unusual choice of paint surface bring extra vitality to this American artist’s engaging portraits, as MARTHA ALEXANDER discovers

- Martha Alexander

Babies grin gummily, seemingly submerged deep inside inky pools of turquoise. Women lie back in washes of magenta or violet. Then the focus changes as if the lens of a camera has been switched and there’s a paisley headscarf in crisp detail, or the sepia back of a girl with long, dark plaits.

Ali Cavanaugh’s paintings, which almost exclusively feature women and children, have a luminous quality, an otherworldly glow, and yet they are powerfully real. They embody an acute sensitivity and seem to offer a glimpse into a hyper-reality.

More than 200 of the Missouri-based artist’s pieces are gathered into a new hardback book, Modern Fresco Paintings, showcasing her working life over the past 11 years. “It is a milestone and encompasses a big era in my life,” she says of the book, which is as dense and light and inviting and secretive as her paintings, adding that she wants to enjoy and reflect on this feat, before getting back to making new work. Whether crisp photorealism or the newer, freer portraits, her figurative paintings all boast a rare quality that makes her stand out.

Ali lost much of her hearing at the age of two having contracted spinal meningitis, and it is this paucity of a major sense that, she believes, might have contributed to her ultimately honing one of her others: vision.

“The hearing loss forced me to depend largely on lip reading and body language to communicate,” she says. “As I grew older, I naturally gravitated to visual interests. I started painting portraits in my teen years and knew that I wanted to go to art school and make painting my career.”