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Running Toward Beautiful Things

Since 1993 I have been engaged with establishing the sweeping movement of artist in residence programs in National Parks. I was awarded and have participated in 8 different residencies over many years. Those residencies have included Yosemite, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Pictured Rocks, Indiana Dunes, Harpers Ferry, Acadia, Isle Royale, Badlands, and Buffalo National River. I continue to spend month long periods of creative practice, a kind of unofficial residency, on North Manitou Island, part of Sleeping Bear Dunes NL, every summer. My own story line deals with how my professional practice continues to source and resource the residencies in broad terms a nd approaches. How these special residencies stay alive in a creative working mind, the memories integrate into new work and transform an isolated experience into far vaster perspectives. In the work I have submitted for this exhibition, Running Toward Beautiful Things, I craft structures on the surface to reference lush and gorgeous pieces of time. I set up the problem of how to put form to intimate experiences with nature, as an example; making up a song and singing it to the echoing sounds against the limestone bluffs of the Buffalo National River, or night swimming off an island in Lake Michigan, or high risk climbs in after sunset twilight from the icy slopes of Yosemite’s precipices, yet without the literal narrative nor iconic appearances of lakes, mountains or rivers. These paintings are provoked by romantic notions of idyllic and isolated natural park environments that sometime later may scuffle with personal urban anxieties. Then the paintings are taken to abstraction, memory, and non objective imagery. I set up the space with gestural and heavily spackled marks that are lushly textural and intuitively applied to the surface. Then slowly build. When I search for strategies to layer visual context, I choose colors to de pict concise temperate or extreme sensations. Specific landscapes are often implied; abrupt shifts in mark making can question if such a place exists. This is a way of establishing a visual memory while washing it away at the same time.

U.S. National Park Service

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Melanie Parke

Public domain:Full Granting Rights

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NPS-wide, Code: NPS

NPS.gov Collection

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Thursday, May 3, 2018 8:44:33 AM

Thursday, May 3, 2018 8:44:33 AM

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Monday, January 1, 0001 12:00:00 AM

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Scenic