Ask most musicians how a song begins, and they’ll talk about a melody, a lyric, or a feeling. Ask Michellar, and there’s a good chance the answer starts with a paintbrush.
For Michelle Bond — the San Francisco-based artist behind Michellar — music and painting were never two separate disciplines competing for attention. They’re two expressions of the same creative instinct, constantly feeding into one another. To understand her music, you have to understand how she paints. And to understand her paintings, you have to listen to her songs.
One Artist, Two Languages
Michelle describes herself simply: a painter with words, a musician with stories. It’s not a clever tagline — it’s an accurate description of how she creates. Her abstract paintings, shaped by influences like Picasso and Kandinsky, are built on color, emotion, and instinct rather than literal representation. Her songwriting works the exact same way. She doesn’t sit down chasing a hit; she sits down chasing a feeling, and lets the words and melody follow wherever that feeling leads.
This is why every cover art featured on her music releases is a hand-painted original, created by Michelle herself. The artwork isn’t decoration added after the fact — it’s part of the song’s identity, painted with the same emotional intention as the lyrics themselves.
Writing From Inside the Moment
When asked about her songwriting process, Michellar has described it as being fully enveloped in a scene — so emotionally attached and vividly engaged that every detail of a memory, a conversation, or a feeling comes rushing back to her. From there, she sings it into lyrics and melody, almost like the story is expressing itself through her rather than being constructed piece by piece.
It’s an instinctive, deeply felt process — closer to channeling than crafting. The same could be said of her approach to painting: abstract, emotional, and guided by instinct rather than a rigid plan.
Roots in Storytelling
Both sides of Michellar’s art trace back to the same source: a childhood shaped by music and storytelling. Raised in a musically inclined family of ten, with a father who played guitar and a mother who sang, Michelle grew up surrounded by melody and narrative. Early influences like Carole King, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Andrew Lloyd Webber shaped her love for songs that feel “beautiful, touching, memorable, and pleasurable.”
That same love for storytelling runs through her paintings — abstract on the surface, but rooted in real memory and emotion underneath.
Two Mediums, One Message
What ties Michellar’s creative process together, whether she’s holding a paintbrush or a microphone, is her commitment to honesty. She isn’t interested in polish for its own sake. She’s interested in truth — the kind that connects one human being to another, regardless of the medium.
That’s ultimately what her creative process is really about: not choosing between art and music, but letting each one make the other more complete. A painting becomes a cover. A memory becomes a melody. And somewhere in between the canvas and the chorus, Michellar tells her story the only way she knows how — fully, and without holding back.