About
Gayle Midnight is a professional artist specializing in ethereal abstract paintings that burst with color and evoke fragments of visual stories drawn from her many globe-trekking adventures.
Born and raised in California, Gayle earned degrees in both fine art and writing from Pepperdine University before spending several years living abroad. She attended the prestigious Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy where she studied fine art, art history and Italian culture, before moving to Osaka, Japan to teach English for the Japanese government. She returned to California to teach art after completing graduate coursework in art education from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Traveling between Europe, Asia and Los Angeles, Gayle ran her own creative studio specializing in illustration, design and art direction, before donating all her possessions and quitting her day job to travel the world and fully embrace the nomadic lifestyle.
To fund her travels, Gayle founded a travel magazine focused on art, design, culture and food. Working with international governments and travel bureaus all over the world, she adventured and travel wrote her way across 6 continents, 50+ countries, and over 400 cities, making art all along the way.
These days, Gayle maintains a studio in San Francisco and paints every chance she gets between raising 3 wild little creatures. She also creates art for clients such as Billabong, Southern Bride magazine, Bratz Dolls, EasyJet Traveller, Natural Health magazine, Tourism Fiji and Switzerland Tourism, among many others.
Gayle’s art has been published in countless magazines and publications worldwide. She has exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and her art can be found in numerous private collections around the globe.
Clients
Work Featured In:
Collaborations + Pop-Ups
Press
Excerpts from the feature interview: "Sock It To Me: Cool Girl of the Month—Gayle Midnight"
“At the age of five, Gayle Midnight would paint in the studio next to her father. This early creative influence echoes across her paintings today. “My favorite subjects back then included purple unicorns with manes of fire, and underwater worlds. To this day if you look closely, fragments of those early obsessions are still present in much of my work, in updated form of course!”
International exploration has had a tremendous impact on her art and writing, keeping her invigorated and challenged. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Gayle’s multinational quest for stimulation and fodder for her work is the variety of situations she’s found herself in while on the road.
She’s driven her car into quicksand in Iceland – “Boy does a car sink fast!” – been stranded on a Greek Island, gotten scammed into taking a fake floating market tour by a monk in Thailand, and she was picked up by German police in Munich when she got lost at Oktoberfest. Her adventuring often has been mouth-first; while gallivanting across the globe she’s consumed poisonous pufferfish, skewered salamanders, “stinky tofu,” putrefied shark, and the still-beating heart of a snake tossed in a shot of vodka in Tapei!
When she’s not traveling, eating exotic delicacies, playing her pineapple ukulele, drawing space ninjas, or practicing the martial art of Jeet Kune Do, Gayle sets out on individual artistic missions. “I’ve pushed boundaries with my creative goals,” she says. “One year I challenged myself to paint 100 paintings in under a year. I reached my goal in just ten months and have been painting up a storm ever since.”
She credits those months with spurring a ton of personal growth, as her ambitious painting schedule forced her to overcome many of her weaknesses and to explore her strengths as a painter.
Although it’s grueling, the rewards are great. “I think the biggest challenge to being a freelance artist is facing rejection on a daily basis, maintaining a healthy ego, and mustering up the courage to continue to follow an unconventional course in life,” she says. “You just have to accept the fact that not everyone is going to understand the need to put everything aside in order to dedicate yourself to creating art.”
For her tenacious traveling and artistic endeavors, we think Gayle Midnight is a Cool Girl!” —Sock It To Me: Cool Girl of the Month Feature Interview
Excerpts from the feature interview: "Sustainable Sushi: The Art of Sushi: Fish, Life, and Gayle Midnight
"The gifted and lovely Gayle Midnight is a well-known artist based in the Los Angeles area. She is supremely talented and works in an impressive array of media, including oil on canvas, illustration, and graphic design. Her work is displayed in numerous exhibitions and galleries around the world, and much of it has been snapped up by art collectors who lamentably discovered her before I did.
Gayle spent two years living in Japan, and I'm guessing that this is at least part of what has inspired her to use sushi imagery in her work. What interests me about Gayle's art is her uncanny ability to depict the connection between sushi and life.
Gayle has managed to use sushi to portray these undersea organisms as the vivacious, mysterious, beating-heart marvels that they are. Her vibrant, almost monstrous depictions of the animals "behind the sushi" strikes a chord with me. Salmon roe sport teeth, similar to those they would have developed had they been allowed to hatch and mature. A clutch of eels writhe and squirm against a nori yoke, struggling mightily to escape a hackneyed kabeyaki fate. Cold- or warm-blooded, exo- or endo-skeletal, shelled or scaled, pelagic or benthic… it makes no difference. Gayle's work ably demonstrates that all of the ocean's inhabitants merit our reverence, as does the amazingly complex ecosystem that they compose."
—Author, Speaker & Ocean Activist Casson Trenor of Sustainable Sushi (This interview refers to a series of monster sushi children’s book illustrations Gayle created.)
Awards
HOW Design Award
CASE District VII Award in Visual Identity Systems
Two-time Santa Barbara Foundation Grant Recipient
Studio Arts College International Selected Artist in Florence, Italy