Last Look: Michelle

lot of fun. Often he would come to me and say something like, “I love fraisier, can we do it?” Or I would bring him something, and we would tweak it. Everything we did there was so classically French.

He must have been a change of pace from Patrick O’Connell.

Patrick is just an incredible human. What I learned most from him was about true hospitality and how to take care of guests. He knew how to take something very simple and mundane to another place.

How did you get into pastry?

It started super early on. I come from a large family of five kids, and my mom is an excellent cook, but she doesn’t have a knack for baking. I had a sweet tooth, so I started making cakes and enjoyed it. When it came time to think about a career, I knew it would be in some creative realm. I think it was my dad who finally said, “Pastry can be a career.”

CULTURE LAST LOOK

TO HELL AND BACK

Rachel DeJong’s pains aux raisins are a testament to her extensive baking experience.

And your first job was at the Baker’s Palette right here in C’ville?

I started college at James Madison University but decided I wanted to get my hands dirty. That’s when Sheila [Cervelloni] took me on with no experience. She taught me all she knew. It was a huge help and eye-opening.

Then after a stint at Gearharts Fine Chocolates, you left.

I think everybody goes through a growth period where their hometown feels small. I was ready to be away from Charlottesville. But working at the Inn, I still had connections and kept in touch with those folks. I would come home for holidays and hear what was going on from family and friends.

Now that you’re back, what can people expect from you?

Technique-wise, I’m a traditionalist. I have always loved French pastry, and all of my work is grounded in that. When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother always had a natural and organic world—wild flowers and growing their own stuff. I like finding ways to bring those two worlds together and elevate classic French pastry, bringing to it a natural, organic, tangible, free style.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Michelle Gagliano and Stuart Gunter’s collaborative reinterpretation of Dante’s Inferno is featured in a virtual artist talk and happy hour hosted by the Gallery at IX on December 3 at 5pm.

Years before the 2020 pandemic, artist Michelle Gagliano developed a fascination with Dante’s Inferno and set out to interpret each of the poem’s 34 cantos through one painting per week. She completed the project, and exhibited it in 2017. But as the virus and social and political unrest escalated this spring, the work called her back. She knew there was hope in Dante’s journey through hell, and she wanted to convey that to the modern world. Enlisting poet/musician Stuart Gunter to react to her work, Gagliano then combined Gunter’s prose with her paintings to create a book. Originally intended for her sons, the collection evolved into a playful, hopeful, reinterpretation of optimism, just like Dante’s quote: “I saw the beautiful things that the sky holds: and we issued out, from there, to see, again, the stars.” —Tami Keaveny

Michelle Gagliano: “My favorite during this period of a boiling political climate is Canto 12, ‘Violence Against Neighbors,’ or ‘Neighbors Against Neighbors.’ The image portrays two couples staring at

“Once Again to See the Stars: One Artist’s Contemporary Vision of Dante’s Inferno”

Paintings by Michelle Gagliano. Words by Stuart Gunter Gallery at IX (virtual) | studioix.co

each other, one sitting on a big lawn mower, their chins jutted out with angry faces and attitudes. Suburban anger. I painted the background with an image of a clogged artery, thinking how internally toxic we’ve become. Dante traveled inward to self-reflection, and part of that means confronting issues clogging us all.”

Stuart Gunter: “I think the whole idea is a testament to Michelle’s artistry—as far as we can determine, she is the first female artist to reinterpret Dante’s Inferno. Her whimsical but intense treatment of each canto really makes me think hell is all the more beautiful and all the more daunting. I think ‘An Everlasting Quarrel’ (Canto 30) is pertinent these days—it puts me in mind of a story I recently heard about a Nelson County octogenarian discussing the fact that if anyone stepped onto her property to install the pipeline that was recently defeated, she would simply shoot them.”