Michal Luch Onyon is an accomplished designer, illustrator, and painter. She received a BFA from the University of Utah and began oil painting several years ago after a career in illustration and graphic design. She adds, “I think all these past experiences help me as I discover that painting encompasses more than a lifetime of challenges and ideas. It is a timeless feeling to escape everyday life by trying capture and reinvent from a world so much bigger and varied than we can imagine.” Onyon was previously profiled on The Krakens for A Family Tree of Talent.
What inspires your creativity these days? When I paint I am striving to create an alternate reality. I attempt to manipulate the world in varying degrees. How much am I using realism and how much fiction alters it? In every painting I am making problems and then solving them. I love rocks, trees, birds, people, patterns, animals, colorful geometric objects…and everything else. I struggle to make emotional, edgy work and keep coming up with lively, happy stuff (should I quit using orange?) If I could get over my need to be pleasant and in control and make life symmetrical, I would be a different artist. I try for harmonious yet exciting changes of color. Different artists amaze me. At any given time I have a stack of open resource books: Field guides to birds, Maynard Dixon, Gustave Klimt, Diebenkorn, Illuminated Renaissance Manuscripts, Hieronymous Bosch, Modern Primitives, photographs of landscapes, Anatomy.
