About the Art
Each one of my pieces is an animalistic love letter to a specific place in my travels. The narrative depicted in these love letters results from obsessional observation and immersion in a landscape and culture to discover a location’s unique tone. Like all true love, my process requires finding beauty in even the dark ugly secrets of a subject’s past and present. I embody my subject through costume and performance, even if I have no audience, until I am prepared to release a loving, but at times playfully ironic, tribute onto the canvas.
Can’t turn a Badger into a house cat
Alison Cline was born into an artist family in Boulder, Colorado. Her artistic parents and older brother nurtured her natural inclination to creative expression in drawing and painting from a very young age. She devoted her free time to this passion throughout her childhood and adolescence. She took her first (and admittedly very low-paying) commissions as a high schooler.
After high school, her fascination with animals veered her into studying Wildlife Biology at Colorado State University. After spending three months in the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador on a mission to learn Spanish in a biological hotspot, she developed a fascination with new lands and different cultures. This led her to eventually earn a Master’s in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education and a three-year stint teaching science in Denver Public Schools. Realizing this structured existence wasn’t compatible with her skills and personality, she returned to the more flexible life of bartending to fund world travel and return to a life saturated in creative thought and expression.
Alison has extensively explored and occasionally resided in, 30 different countries spanning six continents. By avoiding the typical tourist route and choosing to engage with less sought-after experiences while abroad, she has encountered great beauty and joy, but also destruction, atrocity, and trauma. She has learned multiple languages, crossed nine countries by bicycle, studied Samba in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, consumed psychedelics with shamans, hunted wild boars in the outback, narrowly survived multiple tropical diseases, and escaped entrapment in Croatia. She sees her experiences and unique perspective as the backbone and motivation for her current work.
She was recently featured on the front page of the Republikein, a national newspaper of Namibia, for her work as a traveling artist. Her debut exposition, “Life, Death and Hedonism” was held at Jared Steinberg Studio, RiNo Art District First Fridays, Denver, Colorado in 2022.
© 2024 Alison Cline. All rights reserved.