About Ali
Creativity and a Passion for Trees
Born to teenage parents, Ali Mignonne's childhood was brimming with youthful fun and energy. Add four younger siblings and a neighborhood crawling with kids, and she had adventures brewing day and night. Summers were spent playing elaborate games of hide-and-seek, conducting top-secret meetings in the playhouse, and ziplining through the trees in her creek-side backyard. It was a vibrant, charmed childhood, but tainted, like so many beautiful things, with life's bitter realities. Family upheaval, untimely deaths, religious turmoil, and a stroke at age twenty all played a role in shaping Ali's character and destiny. From this wonderful, tragic beginning grew a powerful imagination and a drive to create a new reality and make the world a better place. Ali has found her avenue to do so through imagination and creation.
A professional artist by day, Ali paints highly textured, sculptural trees in magical settings using rich colors and moving imagery to evoke a sense of wonder. She carries this dramatic expression into her writing. She combines mystery, history, science fiction, and romance into vivid, literary works of art that transport readers to a sublime, sometimes transcendental, state she refers to as Imagīne (long second i). Like her art, Ali's writing is deeply embedded in nature. Trees, trails, water, rocks, wildlife, and the like are present throughout her work, forming a fluid sense of connectedness between the characters and nature.
ART
The tradition and love of painting were passed down to Ali through the generations on both her mother and father's side. Her great-grandmother Lillian (father's side) was a prolific oil-painter and tapestry maker, grandmother Irene (mum's side) a painter and interior decorator, and her mother, Sherri Mignonne, a well-known professional painter. So, it was a natural progression for Ali to pick up the paintbrush. With no formal training, Ali honed her skills by working side by side with her mother and grandmother, studying techniques of artists she admired, and following her most treasured guide, Intuition.
"Mema" Irene - artist, decorator, and one of Ali's greatest artistic inspirations.
Ali's mom, Sherri Mignonne blazed the trail ahead of Ali, making the daunting pathway to becoming a professional artist seem obtainable.
Great-Grandmother and painter
Lillian MacLaughlan Hull with Ali.
Ali’s trademark sculptural style developed by chance in the early 2000s after a year of home renovations. As she was using joint compound to create a stone wall effect in her bathroom, she discovered the compound's ability to form different shapes. She began experimenting with brick and stone effects throughout her home and then on a series of cat houses built with her granddad, Ray. Before long, she was toying with the idea of sculpting a floor-to-ceiling tree in her dining room, but instead of experimenting on her freshly painted walls, she took her tree idea to canvas. After much trial and error and transitioning from joint compound to paint, she developed her current technique of blending paint with thickening agents and utilizing palette knives and cake decorating tools to create 3-D trees that pop off the canvas.
Having both a passion for nature and a bent towards fantasy, Ali’s works are a mixture of the earth’s wonders and the mind’s fancy. She combines ordinary scenes with out-of-context colors or images to carry the observer past the boundaries of reality. Her paintings are dramatic and evoke strong emotions with high contrast in color and lighting.
Ali’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, and Texas and have been sold to collectors worldwide.
WRITING
Writing was Ali's first creative love and remains a part of her daily expression. She's written stories, monologues, and songs throughout the years, with Tangled Fates being her first novel and first published work. She is currently writing the sequel "Blackthorn," which she hopes to release in 2021.
"I want to bring new worlds into existence, things that have never been seen or dreamed. For me, writing is creation- from conception in my imagination, to the moment of glory when I give birth to places and characters I've spent months or years developing."
- Ali