Melanie Parke’s Interiors
Artist Melanie Parke’s interior still life paintings have captivated me since I first happened upon her work at a gallery in Virginia back in 2013. Whenever a new painting by Melanie arrives at the gallery here in Maine, I make a point to spend a little extra time with it - taking in all of the details, big and small. Something I hear time and time again about Melanie’s work is how visitors to the gallery yearn to be transported to the settings depicted in her paintings. To sit at the table, to look out the window, to drink the tea, to taste the fruit.
Not only is Melanie a talented visual artist, she also happens to be a gifted writer and is able to infuse so much of herself and her perspective in what she writes about her work. Below, I’ve gathered some of my favorite snippets of Melanie’s writing that she has shared on Instagram about her interior still life paintings.
“I started my young drawing life around third grade, kept a lined notebook to jot observations down and often drew our family kitchen table. My stills are not from life but are constructed now, and it's the body of work I keep coming back to for all the challenges they present in conceiving, assembling, and sitting with. Inventing a space that feels immediately safe and ultimately consoling feels urgent to me.”
“Interiors tell stories of the way people live, what they touch and care about. I often feel like a writer in this series of small interiors, narrating not stories about my own life, but stories of characters, though not seen, are felt.”
“My interiors and garden motifs are constructed out of images I piece together from piles of source material - my own travel photographs and magazine snippets. I like to start my studio time at my desk, drinking tea and flipping through these scraps and fragments as I look up at the work in progress. One little remnant can spark one painting to a whole series, or help me piece in a missing element. So often I'm looking to reconstruct both a kind of ideology and a memory of dreamy days spent in island cottages and Roman villas.”
“To the question how long does it take to finish a painting, I average about 6 months for oils. I let paintings sit in their raw, initial start stage quite a while and just look. Meanwhile I plan, begin or finish others. There is a big difference between the flurry of that initial spark which begins a painting and hurrying it along to finish. Both high octane energies, but so polar opposite. Love the inceptive flurry, but I've never been a hurrier. Not in life, not in painting. Interruptions certainly figure into the whole too, but I don't seem to mind them as much as I did when I was a younger painter.”
Photo by Douglas Witmer.
Be sure to follow along with Melanie on Instagram here for a glimpse into her daily walks and what inspires her, as well as a her latest paintings and her thoughts on her work.
