I came across Melanie Parke's paintings online a few years ago and I was struck at the way I felt when I looked at them-- a sense of awe and peace. Her paintings of open windows looking from the inside out-- it's like the outdoor light is singing on everything in the interior.
Here's a short interview with her:
Laura Vahlberg: I've been experimenting with some memory painting. It's so exciting and challenging! I love the way memory distills an image. Does memory painting play a role in your practice?
Melanie Parke: I’ve been enjoying the game of trying to figure out which of your paintings is a memory painting now, looking for the distillations as a clue. The idea is so alluring to me I want to stop what I’m doing and get on your program of memory paintings! I have a real craving for discovering what distillation may come and what it could look like in my own work now that you mention it.
Memory is a huge driver for me. I’m more of a painter that relies on prompts and props, though, to reconstruct the memory of feelings, sensations, sentiments. Emotions of desire and longing play a big part in my work. I collect oodles of source material and sift through it when I first get to the studio. It fuels up my image engine. I rarely work from memories in my mind without these prompts. Thinking of distillation again, maybe I’ve come closest to that sense of distillation in my recent night paintings, remembering and reconstructing a summer I spent waking and walking before dawn, studying bird song. In that body of work I wanted to set up the visual experience of an image revealing itself very slowly from the dark, partially, and indeterminably.
LV: Let’s talk about your interior/window paintings. For some of your paintings you seem to bring the outdoor light into the room so that everything feels sort of electrified with light. For other paintings the inside space feels darker and more distant from the outside world. Can you talk a little bit about inside/outside spaces in your work? How do you know where to put the window frame in the picture plane (the picture within a picture)?
MP: Electrified with light, I like that. The landscape is super sexy to me. I spent my earliest painting years outdoors, deep in the mosquito buzzing woods, high up on dunes, on the beach, in windy grassy meadows, and I find nature endlessly stimulating. Interiors are containers of desire for me, and a window represents a sensual longing, because the landscape is a place that can absorb and return enormous amounts of desire. Every time I compose a window in a painting, I also feel like I am having a conversation with painters I have shared a great yearning with like Winifred Nicholson, Biala, Jane Freilicher, and I find so much comfort in a dialogue with them and this tradition. Where the window goes, I guess I place it in relation to gaze or objects on a table...
Sometimes desire in a work is less about looking outward, though, so may not call for a window. It is more ebullient, buoyant, exuberant, and in these interiors I like conveying desire flowering on walls, a source of it’s own light.
Perhaps the darker interiors contain a realm where desire can be found contented, slowed down, quietly curious.
LV: How do you know when a picture is completed? Are there specific goals you have in mind in completing a picture?
MP: I have goals, so many goals, hence the desire! Yeah, I feel like this question is so compelling because we begin a painting with so many possibilities, yet we find ways to proceed and mark out a direction and eventually stop. I set up projects for myself, particularly to probe a certain emotional atmosphere. I often have a couple of series going, it’ a way of sowing a bunch of seeds. Kathy Bradford once said that a painting has many stages of completion and I like paying attention to that nuance, those open places where it just feels good to stop and soak up that stage for a while.
Melanie Parke's work can be seen at Garvey/Simon in NY, Anne Loucks Gallery (in Glencoe, IL), Kenise Barnes (in Kent, CT), Meyer Vogl (in Charleston, SC), Blue Print Gallery (in Dalls, TX), Beth Urdang (in Boston MA), and the Willard Gallery (in South Portland, ME).