thePULSEGetting a second chance
Artist Christine Montecalvo survives tragedy to paint with a new outlook
January 2005 – They say that cats have nine lives, but people usually only get one. Local artist Christine Montecalvo is one of the exceptions.
On September 4, 2003, Montecalvo was in a horrific automobile accident. Her car veered off the road, took out three telephone poles and hit a concrete wall just as one of the poles came crashing through the side of the car. If her seat had not been all the way back, the pole would have gone through her head.
Montecalvo was in a coma for two weeks and in rehab for six months after that. Today, she has pins and pieces of metal in various parts of her body and has to go to a special security room to be checked out every time she goes to the airport.
Instead of being morose and morbid about the whole ordeal, Christine Montecalvo looks on the incident as giving her a second chance. And this is reflected in her artwork.
During and after her stint at the Art Institute of Boston [AIB], where she earned her BFA, Montecalvo’s artwork was good, but lacked focus. She had been making art since she was a small child, adding features and extra images in her coloring books. She began using an airbrush in high school, painting tee shirts and costumes for dance teams. She even won a prize from Createx paints and did demonstrations for the company — a good, but ordinary start to a promising art career.
After the crash, when Montecalvo was finally able, literally, to get back on her feet, her entire outlook had changed. She was happy to be alive, and her paintings began to show this through brighter, more intense colors and a much more accomplished look.
However, paint on canvas is not Montecalvo’s only outlet. People commission her to paint fantasy scenes on their furniture. She has done several chairs at the Curves in Sutton, along with a 25-foot long ceiling mural. She’s done floor to ceiling murals in kid’s rooms and in the local school, too. She’s got ideas for children’s books, one of which, “Gabriel and his Gloomy Day,” is almost ready for publication. Other works are done in Photoshop, altered with paints and other materials and then enlarged.
Montecalvo looks forward to all her painting projects because they provide the opportunity to just get lost in her work — to escape from the physical therapy, the doctors, the ultrasound applications, and the pain. She feels lucky to be here and wants others to have the same feeling. She wants people to stop and spend time with her paintings. She’s not trying to tell a story, but wants the viewers to make up their own.
Montecalvo’s favorite technique is painting directly on her model’s body. She first did this in earnest for her senior show at AIB — creating full costumes, hair styles and makeup, and then airbrushing brightly colored designs all over a half-dozen models. When creating this body art, Christine doesn’t work from sketches or preconceived ideas.
“I paint ’em how I see ’em,” she says, “I look at someone and I might see a dragon or a tiger and then I transform them. The images relate to how I feel about that person at that time.”
Sometime this spring, Christine is scheduled to have a show of her body art, with fully costumed and painted live models, at the Worcester Artist Group gallery, 38 Harlow Street. Stay tuned.
