Music and visual art are unified in the recent works on paper that Susan Melikian is now producing at a furious rate.
On Susan Melikian’s Art
By Ippy and Neil Patterson
TAKE ONE
Music and visual art are unified in the recent works on paper that Susan Melikian is now producing at a furious rate. She’s a jazz singer (with Benny Goodman and Scott Hamilton and other virtuosos during the 70s and 80s), and this skill is evident in the patterns of form, color, and texture she is working into the surfaces of these panels. Some can be seen as three-dimensional torch songs — or the blues, maybe, or sometimes scat —physical ways of conveying the sorrows and longings and highs and lows of feeling that music, and jazz in particular, is able to induce without the encumbrance of mental labor. No thought is needed. The image is more than enough. Music does what smell does, goes straight to memory, like a jolt of electrons. Smell a pine tree and you get Christmas, whether you want it or not. Hear Miles Davis and there is rage and pain. Melikian is delivering a similar effect, the instantaneous force of emotion without cerebral intervention.
Most of her "symbols" are drawn from nature, from biological structures (fragments of plants, shells, grasses, birds’ nests, and the like), a kind of celebration of the living, or the structural remnants of that living, the remains now dry and dead and carrying an elegance and dignity that only the chemistry of life can produce. It is her inventive use of these biological forms that gives Melikian’s new work such confident and positive power.
There is nothing distant or cold in this work; these are not abstractions. Nor are they illustrations, despite their thematic use of biological shapes; they are bright with the heat of life itself. If you get into a room full these images, you are in a hot house; these things are growing on the walls.
Life is the message here. Look and feel! Melikian is giving you her take on life: it ain’t easy, but it is astonishing; and you want it to go on and on.
TAKE TWO
During the late 1990’s, Susan Melikian began drawing on clay: deep in a bowl, a pine cone, as sensitive in its shingling as the real thing; leaves and blossoms across platters, alive as those in her cottage garden. Melikian coupled this work with her profession as teacher, encouraging children in their own creations, carrying to the classroom a continuous stream of treasures from the natural world, and inventing with these beloved students all manner of techniques and media to express the human trait — perhaps never so apparent as in children — to render the living forms around us. The profound joy we take in our awareness of birds, plants, mammals, insects, crustaceans, the love that we feel for our collateral companions, is what E.O. Wilson identified when he coined his word "biophilia".
At fifty, confronted with illness, Melikian turned from ceramics to paper, shifting to that surface some of the methods and materials and all the physicality she had applied to teaching, throwing clay, and blowing glass. Here begins an explosion of creativity. Hours — 10, 11, 12 a day — spent in her studio, seven days a week, every week of the year, waking and rising for the ecstasy of work.
Melikian’s art affects you from within. Lines and shapes one cannot always completely decipher evoke a memory, the mystery of a feeling, a dream, a state of mind, fragmentary, only vaguely conscious. Her technique produces instant pentimento; scraped, blurred and polished, the leathery surface pulls the viewer into a fertile world where earlier, older beds of color and markings elaborate the painting’s individual story.
Scratched, etched, carved figures float to the surface. These telling lines can only be made by an eye that loves the form it sees and a hand that can follow the eye. They assert the artist’s love for this Earth and move the viewer to care.
