Some turning points announce themselves. Others arrive quietly, disguised as an ordinary moment — until you look back and realize everything shifted from there. For Michelle Bond, known today as Michellar, that moment happened on the walls of a museum.
A Painter First
Long before her music found an audience, Michelle was building a life as a visual artist. After stepping away from songwriting as a teenager, she spent decades pouring her creative energy into art and garden design, becoming an established landscape designer in the Bay Area. Her paintings — bold, abstract, and emotionally expressive — became her primary language, the way she processed and communicated the world around her.
It was a full creative life. But it was also, in many ways, only half the story.
The Open Exhibition, 2023
In 2023, Michelle’s work was accepted into the De Young Museum’s Open Exhibition — one of the most respected showcases for artists in the Bay Area. For a painter who had spent years developing her craft outside the spotlight, this was more than a milestone. It was validation on a scale she hadn’t experienced before.
Standing in front of her own paintings displayed in a world-class museum, something shifted. The recognition didn’t just confirm her identity as a visual artist — it unlocked a question she hadn’t let herself ask in decades: what else have I been holding back?
The answer, it turned out, was music.
From Canvas to Chorus
Almost as if the exhibition had given her permission, Michelle’s songwriting instincts — dormant since she was 15 — began to stir again. The same emotional instinct that guided her brushstrokes started showing up in melodies and lyrics. She began writing again, this time as a woman shaped by decades of lived experience, artistic discipline, and quiet patience.
Today, as Michellar, she carries both identities forward at once. Every cover art featured on her music releases is a hand-painted original — created by her own hands, the same hands that once filled museum walls. Her music and her paintings aren’t separate pursuits; they’re two expressions of the same creative source, feeding into and inspiring each other.
She now performs regularly at open mics around San Francisco, bringing the same emotional honesty from her canvases directly to the stage.
One Exhibition, Two Art Forms
What makes Michellar’s story so compelling isn’t just that she returned to music — it’s how she returned. The De Young Museum didn’t just showcase a painter; it reawakened a songwriter who had been waiting patiently in the background for forty years. Her paintings gave her the confidence, and her music gave her the words.
For Michelle, art and music were never really two different paths — they were always the same journey, just told through different mediums. The De Young Museum simply reminded her that she didn’t have to choose.