Madison Faile doesn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. He laughs at the notion of a tortured muse or a dramatic flash of genius. For him, being an artist means working at it every day.
“I’m a debilitating morning person,” he says. “I get up, and I go to the studio.” Some days at his studio—located in Forstall Art Center—are more productive than others, but he’s found that the key is to keep showing up. “That doesn’t always mean I’m tackling a big canvas,” he explains. “That could mean I’m rolling a canvas, varnishing a piece, or priming a canvas—or sometimes I’m just sitting in the studio, staring at the wall.”
On days when a painting falls apart or turns into a mess, he doesn’t waste time agonizing. “That means the next day in the studio, I clean up that mess and start again.”
More often than not, what emerges from that rhythm is something honest, expressive, and unmistakably his.
Ask Madison to describe his artistic style, and he’ll pause. It’s not a simple question for a figurative painter whose work ranges from finely rendered realism to gestural abstraction—and nearly everything in between. What unites his portfolio, he says, is simple: “It all comes from me.”
Madison’s journey began in Selma, Alabama, where he grew up as the only child of a ballet teacher and a district attorney. His earliest influence was his grandmother, an avid portrait painter who first taught him to draw and paint. For a time, he imagined he’d follow directly in her footsteps—and he did, for a while. But it wasn’t long before he discovered his artistic voice refused to be confined to a single genre.
That realization began to crystallize at Troy University, where Madison found both the technical discipline and the creative freedom to explore. “It was a life-changing experience,” he says. “I will never say a negative thing about the Troy University Art Department. In my opinion, it’s one of the best in the state—and it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.”
Like any good art education, Madison’s time at Troy included a few cautionary tales. One came the day he tried his hand at encaustic painting—a process involving hot wax, pigment, and, in his case, a dangerous misunderstanding. “Nobody told me I couldn’t heat up the turpentine,” he laughs. “I was basically making mustard gas in the art building.” Another time, he nearly set the courtyard ablaze during a raku firing. That was hands-on learning at its most memorable.
Later, a required internship brought him to Stonehenge Gallery in Montgomery, where he met influential painters like Clark Walker. “I started hanging shows for him, and then I started helping him around his house. We became close.” Walker’s mentorship became a turning point. “Being around artists who had lived their entire lives as artists—that was the best education I could’ve asked for.”
Today, Madison keeps several of Walker’s pieces on his walls, along with letters the late artist sent him over the years. “When I was living in New Orleans, I had my first show in 2015, and Clark wrote me a beautiful letter, partially in French, and on the back side, he did a little abstracted drawing of me. I cherish it greatly.”
After college, Madison moved to New Orleans because, as he puts it, “it sounded like a good idea.” He knew two people there. “I’ve got the scar and the tattoo to prove it.” In his early twenties, he drifted the way young artists often do—soaking up life and painting constantly. “I learned a lot, and I painted a lot, and I had some very thrown-together art shows that I look back at with a lot of nostalgia.” He returns to the city a few times a year and rides in the Easter Parade. “New Orleans still holds a part of my soul,” he says. “My parents loved it. They spent their honeymoon there, and my dad and I would go multiple times a year.”
Then, unexpected circumstances brought Madison back to Montgomery. He lost both parents in the span of a year. “Being an only child, life brought me back home,” he says. In the midst of grief, a friend stepped in. “A dear, dear friend of mine, who has become family, asked me to come work for her at her newly opened interior design shop, which I did.” That friend was Emelyn Sullivan, owner of Peridot Home. “She picked me up from the lowest point in my life,” he says. “She’s become like a mother to me.”
A few years ago, Madison decided it was time for a change. “I just felt like it was time to move on and move to Birmingham,” he says. “I found everybody at Forstall Art, and we hit it off. I found the studio even before I found my house.” Founded in 1976, Forstall Art Center remains a family-run business, led by Phillip and Annette Forstall, with their daughter, Andy, now involved. “Forstall is an invaluable resource to our community—not just for working artists, but for the city as a whole,” Madison says. “It’s one of the only places where you can buy professional supplies, take a class, and connect with the creative community all in the same space."
In addition to painting full-time, he now teaches weekly classes and workshops at Forstall Art Center, helping students explore both realism and abstraction with the same openness that guides his own practice. He lives nearby, in the heart of downtown, where the walls of his home are covered in a collage of meaningful work—his own, and that of regional artists he admires. “I absolutely love it here,” he says. “I’m extremely content. I have everything I need, and I have no plans to move.”
Step into Madison’s studio, and the outside world quickly fades. Some days are filled with music—Rachmaninoff one moment, 90s country the next. “You never know what you’re going to get,” he says. “I have a studio playlist that I put on, but sometimes I’ll get in there and start working, and three hours will go by that I’ve been working in total silence without realizing it.”
His process is just as intuitive. He might reach for a palette knife, a house-painting brush, or use his fingers. “When it comes to materials, it’s whatever gets the job done,” he says. “I have very fine, expensive brushes that I’ve abused horribly, and I’ve got cheap house painting brushes I’ve had for ten years.”
The color palette stays remarkably steady, whether he’s painting a portrait or a loose abstraction. “I started off as a portrait painter,” he says. “And even now in the abstractions, it’s flesh tones. I use the same palette of color when I do a realistic painting as I do when I do an abstraction.”
Ask Madison why he doesn’t stick to one style, and he doesn’t hesitate. “You have to paint for yourself first,” he says. “If you paint for galleries and clients, that’s good—and that makes you money, and that pays the rent, and that’s wonderful. But at the end of the day, you have to paint for yourself. Nothing leaves the studio that I wouldn’t hang in my own home.”
Not everyone embraces his stylistic range, and he’s okay with that. “A designer once told me, ‘You need to find yourself because you don’t have a voice,’” he says. “That stuck with me—and emboldened me to paint even more drastically different styles. Because the voice, the thread between the abstraction and the realism and everything in between, is me.”
He knows some viewers, too, expect neat consistency—especially online. “Some people like to scroll through someone’s Instagram and see the same thing over and over and over again,” he says. “But if I had to paint the same squiggle every day, I’d lose my mind.”
Instead, he follows what feels true. Some days, that’s a finely rendered figure. Other days, it’s motion and texture and a blur of color. “I very rigorously learned how to draw and paint realistically,” he says. “And I feel that with that, I’m allowed to paint abstractly. I do believe that if you have that training to paint realistically, you are automatically a better abstract painter.”
“What I’m trying to do is to bridge the gap between the two,” he says. “And I feel like I’m close.”
Follow Madison’s work on Instagram: @madison.faile and studio updates @forstallart.
pull quote:
"If you paint for galleries and clients, that's good-and that makes you money, and that pays the rent, and that's wonderful. But at the end of the day, you have to paint for yourself. Nothing leaves the studio that I wouldn't hang in my own home."