You Manifest by Setting Vibes, Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 24"
Elizabeth Johnson: Your newest exhibit at Gross McCleaf Gallery, “Shifting”, suggests a realignment of fear, anger, jealousy, and shame with self-love, acceptance, and calm. I want to give you credit for tackling bald truth-telling. Has your creative process become easier and harder since our last interview?
Mickayel Thurin: “Shifting” is multilayered. I shift my emotions so I can intentionally shift my behaviors and actions so I can ultimately shift the energy I put out into the world. And how that translates into reality makes my life more purposefully aligned. I'm allowing myself to feel the full gamut of my emotions, not fearing the low vibrational ones, holding space for them so I can hear what they are telling me. This gives me the insight to break any patterns that aren’t serving me.
Likewise, my creative process is shifting as I juggle identities and responsibilities such as being an artist, a mom of both a teen and a toddler, working full time in corporate America, being Black, being a woman, being neurodivergent, being an eldest daughter, being an entrepreneur, being a wife, all while making time to calm my nervous system and enjoy just being conscious no matter what is going on outside my brain. I’ve gotten better at finding balance, living in the present, and enjoying experiences that took priority over making art, which got harder with children. But I knew I only had so much time with them as kids, they are growing and becoming independent. Plus, I feel life is art, I am art, my kids are art. How I dress, what I cook, how I keep my home, the interactions I have, and my relationships are all art.
I had Maximo in 2024 after pregnancy complications. When I started breastfeeding, I got shingles. My life and art practice slowed way down and I learned to enjoy it. I switched to doing a lot of drawings on my phone so that I could pause as needed. I used it to capture ideas and inspiration.
Open, Mixed media on canvas, 10" x 8"
MT: I thought about how I show up in life, what I like, what I didn’t. I spent the year shedding unaligned things. By the end of 2025, I came out of hermit mode and returned to traditional artmaking. I rented a studio. I defined a schedule with my husband so I could have time to create. And that’s only snowballed in 2026. I had a ton of ideas from the previous year to pull from, and life is always giving me more and I am grateful. My biggest fear had been that if I set down the paint brush, I wouldn’t be inspired to pick it up again. But, if anything, time away made me hungrier for artmaking.
EJ: With Choosing My Peace No Matter What, Getting Perspective, What You Are Looking For is Inside You, You Manifest by Setting Vibes, and Open: are you juxtaposing empty and full?
MT: I think in terms of finding balance and flow. While making art, I am listening for what feels right. Some works with heavier content may need more joyful colors. Work that has bulkier materials may need to be balanced by a wider range of textures or patterns. I wait for the contrast to make sense. I try to be flexible and finish each painting to the degree it seems to want to flow towards. Eventually, in my head it feels complete and balanced enough for whatever it is trying to say.
How I am showing up in life impacts the piece's emotional activity. These days I am in a more peaceful and regulated mind space than ever. It’s not got anything to do with the outside reality: the world is super intense and crazy right now...
"...I feel I finally understand myself; I have integrated my shadows and have set a new energetic baseline. The quiet space is the buffering of my environment and intentionally seeking peace, joy, and whimsy. It is the observation of the shift." - Mickayel Thurin
Work in progress in Mickayel Thurin's Studio
EJ: Most artists attend personal emotional depths in one way or another: masking, making metaphors, mirroring symbolic parts of ourselves. Involving physical materials allows personal study to be lastingly creative.
Do you think of creativity as an interactive 3-D road map of passing emotions and thoughts? Would, say, revisiting earlier work affect current creative decisions?
MT: Creativity as a road map through emotions, yes, I do think of it that way.
As for emotion, I am also trying to account for varying perspectives of spacetime and multiple realities. I feel like my physical body is limited to a narrower bandwidth than what actually exists. We can only hear within a certain range, we can only perceive a certain spectrum of color. Though our brains tend to utilize only the usual neural pathways, that doesn’t mean other colors and sounds do not exist. We can shed our habits. My paintings use mismatched material to represent these drastically different frequencies of energy, perspective, and potential.
Revisiting old work normally makes me feel bolder. I want to push the boundaries more and make the work even more palpable. I am curious and I have ADHD. I continually seek novelty and dopamine. I have little interest in doing the same thing the same way, even though I know I thrive with structure.
I tend to look at older work favorably, since I have forgotten the piece's technical failures. Usually, I appreciate what’s there, which encourages me to make new art.
A Multidimensional Queen, Mixed media on canvas, 16" x 12"
EJ: Recent pieces give the impression of confidence: things fly apart and come together in an organic, painterly, and sculptural way. What inspired A Multidimensional Queen? Was the feeling that two sides of the piece are both fragmented yet balanced with each other the key to knowing it was done? Is the pale blue fuzzy figure made of a bathrobe tie?
A Multidimensional Queen (Detail), Mixed media on canvas, 16" x 12"
MT: Yes, it is!
I am someone who does things scared––and my way. I don’t usually feel very confident going into art making or new endeavors, but I do know that my willpower is stronger than insecurity and fear. I experienced a lot of anxiety and trauma growing up. I always felt like an outcast, the weirdo, and people often misunderstood me. Compared to that, art is such low stakes, and I may as well do it my way. I have to create it for myself first. If others benefit from it, cool, but that’s not the goal.
A Multidimensional Queen is a soul encountering itself in a godhead form (or its higher self) in the astral realm. Some parts are perceived differently than others, some objects opaque and others transparent, some only outlines, others comprised of literal space. The piece references the cosmic scale of life. According to quantum physics, we are all the same electrons moving through space and time, and it is consciousness––our attention––that runs the show. The godhead originally started as a self-portrait, but then I began playing with materials and added the figures.
Animals, bugs, nature, stars, objects: we are all the same awareness. Energy playing in costume. The universe experiencing itself through infinite perspectives.
EJ: I like your depictions of questions and assertions in full frontal portraits such as Choose to be Brave, How Are You Really?, Shifting, Realignment, It's OK to be Perceived, and Learning to Chill. Do titles come while painting? Learning to Chill is especially emotive to me because the disjointed figure is serenely and humorously awash in an alphabet soup of her thoughts. How did this piece happen?
Learning to Chill and What You Are Looking for is Inside You in Mickayel Thurin's Studio
MT: Sometimes I start with words from my meditations, books, musings, music, my Notes app.
For Learning to Chill, the image came first. Bathing is like a portal: you go in one thing and come out another, like with baptism, a rebirth. I like to add herbs and oils and affirmations to my bathwater. Water is great at holding energy, whatever you program it with.
The words in Learning refer to the body’s seven chakras. They say, “I am, I feel, I do, I love, I speak, I see, and I know.” These correspond to the root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown chakras. I added them to the bath painting as a nod to manifesting and aligning those energy centers.
EJ: Double portraits such as Me? We Love Her, Never Too Much, Getting Perspective, and Realignment express relationships with oneself and children as extremely rich and dynamic. Images such as pouring words out of a tea pot, joining two figures with protective words, and creating a floor of stars are very fresh.
I am not a mother, but I was my mom’s caretaker for fifteen years, and I observed that sometimes I mirrored her deeply and sometimes I felt overwhelmed by her. I don't mean this next question to sound judgmental of chosen roles but more of a chance to express how they may have affected your art differently:
Does making pieces that draw on being a mom significantly differ from those that reflect discovering and nurturing oneself?
Learning to Chill, Acrylic on canvas, 30" x 24"
Mickayel Thurin and baby Maximo
MT: When you are responsible for someone else you experience yourself from another perspective.
Being a caretaker is intimate like childrearing. And if it's your parent or your child, they––genetically and through nurture or generational trauma––mirror you very well.
My kids are minis of my husband and me, the parts we like and the parts we do not, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Raising kids made me review my own childhood. It made me deal with generational trauma.
My kids made me more conscious of my behavior patterns: Did I want to continue them or pass them on?
Pieces like Never Too Much are me talking to my inner child from my higher perspective, telling myself the things that I wish I people had told me when I was little.
The beauty is that I am still here and neuroplasticity is a thing. I tend to use archetypes a lot in my work, probably because they are my known experience.
Shifting, Mixed media on canvas, 14" x 11"
EJ: Shifting feels like a portrait of an older, very wise woman. I notice the reflection and repetition of eyes within glasses that seem to trail off into infinity. What was the emotional drive behind this portrait? Is it a self-portrait?
It gives me the impression of someone listening to echoes within themselves that reverberate into the future. Originally the show was titled "Shadow Work": why did you title your exhibit after this painting?
MT: Shifting takes place in the grid/matrix setting. The eyes are indeed ascending into another reality, another version of herself. She does this by realigning herself and her energy.
There is a kind of matrix tunnel at the top right of the painting that represents the edge of the universe. Each grid window is a frame of reality to hop in or out of, presenting options based on what we do, think, how we move. It also illustrates how I think of time and space: a constantly-in-flux-everything-already-there higher dimension than what our bodies can perceive fully.
“Shifting” seemed the better word than “shadow work.” Most of the pieces are about transition and learning. Shadow work helps me accomplish the shift. Integrating the unconscious bits of myself lets me be me. All the paintings are self-portraits, and with some I am more successful at being myself than others. "Shifting” is a continual practice, a verb, not a one-time thing. It works on the emotional level, the art practice level, the life stage level.
Choose to be Brave, Mixed media on canvas, 10" x 8"
EJ: Choose to be Brave uses words aggressively, equating covering a face with words with filling a person with fear and hope.
I relive the stress of feeling both at once. When you talk to people and watch their faces, do you simultaneously hear and visualize the words?
MT: This may be an ADHD thing. When I talk to people, I usually avoid looking at their faces.
I find it incredibly distracting and I find eye contact to be extremely intimate and intense. I feel like I am looking into someone’s soul and they can see into mine.
It felt like seeing too much when I looked in someone’s eyes, so, I avoided it.
Maybe that is what you are referencing. I see their energy more than specific words.
Choose to be Brave is a self-portrait and a message to myself. It’s a reminder that we have options inside.
We have free will.
EJ: You Manifest by Setting Vibes and Open both feel positive but in different ways. The former is a proud, realistic, external figurative view, the latter is more abstract, dreamy, and internal. How does shifting, shadow work, or overcoming suppression, overlap with uniting internal and external perspectives of oneself?
Mickayel Thurin in Studio
MT: Supposedly, when we are little, 0 to 4-ish, we formulate our self-identity and belief systems. Our guardians, society, and environment set these "truths" upon us. We take these belief systems and use them as filters and rule books in life. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it doesn’t. Eventually, we hide and suppress the parts of ourselves that don't conform to those belief systems. And just because they are hidden and repressed, doesn’t mean they don’t come out when we are dysregulated.
Shadow work integrates conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche. It traces those aspects back to the belief systems and decides if they serve us. And if not, we can reprogram our brains and let them go. Our external reality will magically always give us opportunities to see the patterns and let them go. If you miss a pattern, don’t worry, it will return. Shadow work upgrades you to your authentic self. It’s humbling and unsexy work. You must be honest with yourself: 99.99% of the time it’s not flattering. Often you think you are moving backwards, but you keep at it. I have witnessed the peace and clarity it brought into my life. I see how my external life mirrors my inner voice/life/energy. I don’t care anymore to minimize or hide it. It doesn’t matter what other people think. I am shifting to something different. It's worth being vulnerable, it's becoming fun.
––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)
June 2026
Mickayel Thurin giving an Artist Talk at Gross McCleaf Gallery
About the Artist
Mickayel Thurin is a Haitian American artist whose work explores themes of emotion, spirituality, and the human experience through mixed media. She grew up in the Mid-Atlantic region and earned a BFA and a four-year certificate through the joint program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, later completing her Master’s at Penn State.
Thurin was the founder of Seen Heard Connected, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness and providing financial assistance to marginalized communities. She was an artist-in-residence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and has exhibited work at the Philadelphia International Airport, The Delaware Contemporary, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Woodmere Art Museum, the Saginaw Art Museum, and many local galleries.
Thurin and her work have been featured in several publications, on film and TV (WHYY’s Infinite Art Hunt). She has also partnered with Mural Arts, the PMA, the Philadelphia Magic Gardens, DVAA and others to conduct art workshops with the public. She currently has work up at the Rockwood Museum and Park’s We the People, Woodmere’s 83rd Annual, and will have an upcoming solo show, Care, Kin, Perspective, at the Philadelphia Magic Garden later this year.
Thurin lives and works in Philadelphia with her husband, fellow artist Benjamin Passione, and their two sons, Maurice and Maximo. She is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.