E-MAIL
furelisemccall (at) gmail (dot) com
BIO
Elise Gioia McCall is a painter, concept artist, and comic illustrator. She has illustrated for titles including: REBURN (with Alyson Shelton) and SPY ISLAND (Dark Horse Comics). Her work also includes concept art & storyboards for film projects with director and producer Jessica Petelle. She notably designed the logo for Fredrik Knudsen’s Down the Rabbit Hole series.
Her and her artist husband are longtime gamers and together they reside in the rainy Pacific Northwest.
STATEMENT
I paint enigmatic figures laid bare in lurid colors. My subjects include people like my husband and my mom, animals like cats and slugs, mythical beings like vampires and ghosts, and, recently, my collection of stuffed animals. I depict these bodies with empathy to better relate to their uncanny likenesses, paradoxically animate and inanimate.
In The Collected Schizophrenias, author Esmé Weijun Wang writes, “People speak of schizophrenics as though they were dead without being dead, gone in the eyes of those around them.” My gentle mother lives with schizophrenia. I watched society relegate my mom to the fringes. I don’t share her diagnosis but I walk alongside her in an inseparable bond that shapes my art. In my art I feel caught in-between realms, sometimes like an invisible specter forced to fade; at other times, a vengeful spirit who haunts the living with imagery of a repressed emotional state.