Artist's Statement
As a returning ex-pat, now in my early 50’s, I bring to my art a naive maturity born of a formative cross-country road trip as a single woman re-experiencing her land.
One day I was driving through San Jose and I noticed a figure on a pole. It was a beautiful sight and I thought how cool is that public work of art. Then he moved and I realized it was a lineman at work. This was when I became aware that there was no distinction between art and life. The next time I walked through the hall of the painting studios and smelled the linseed oil at UCD I had the sense that I was entering into a painting. My life was art.
For 12 years I have been nurturing an emerging photographic identity and I identify myself as a student. The study of photography is the study of life. My life. I am practicing self-discovery through photography. This study of photography has opened up the world of art for me. It is a vehicle for understanding. I now understood happenings, performance, fluxus and Marcel Duchamp. I have lost myself in my art so that I may find myself. I have made some very interesting work.
The first pictures I looked at were the clouds. My mother was the first artist in my life. She took me to art museums. I loved the old masters - Van Gogh. I fell in love with a self-portrait by James Tissot. I went out into the world and scratched my head at the words ‘minimalism’ and ‘conceptualism.’ This is when I picked up a camera and found the tool with which I might be able to say something and…I wanted to know and I could do it and I did it and now…
“The only way to understand something is to be confronted by something that is difficult to understand.”
- Frederick Sommer
Born and raised in Salinas, California. My mother was a vernacular artist and my first teacher. She taught me how to see by watching clouds. She trained me to draw and to paint what I saw. When I was 17 I moved to Davis, California and hung about at the university art department. I audited classes taught by Cornelia Schultz (she said my drawings resembled Philip Guston) and Ralph Johnson (he said my paintings resembled James Ensor). I sat on the floor for Wayne Thiebaud’s modern art lectures. Roy Deforest was my favorite painter on the faculty. William T. Wiley made an impression, as did H.C. Westerman. I was shedding my first skin, looking for a voice. I was given a copy of ‘Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees’ by Robert Irwin and I didn’t know what to make of what it was that it was.
“My art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.” - Marcel Duchamp
I married a British biochemist and I was showing small pictures of furniture; couches and chairs. We had a daughter and moved to Basel, Switzerland. I stopped painting pictures of furniture and started painting the furniture. At the Musee de L’art Brut in Lausanne I identified with the outsider artists. Research publications showed me Linda Montano, whose practice of living art planted a seed. I had ignored my photography until seeing Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait with bullwhip at Art Basel 1991. In 1993 we moved to England. I tried carving wood, then stone. Then.
An exhibition called The Shipping Forecast by Mark Power at the Brighton Museum grabbed my attention. I wanted to learn how to use a camera. How to really use a camera. In 1998 I started at the beginning and the first time my image appeared in the developing tray I was hooked. I ate, slept and breathed photography. I learned everything there was to know about film photography; the history, the processes, the genres, the characteristic curves, the names of photographers; the artists of photography. There seemed to be so many ways to speak with photography. I wanted to make art that had something to say but didn’t know how to get my message across.
“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.”
- John Steinbeck
In Brighton I studied William Wegman and John Baldessari and conceptual art was explained to me. Edward Ruscha’s use of the camera as “a dumb recording device” to make his artist’s books with catchy titles had a liberating influence. Dr. Ameisenhaufen’s ‘Fauna’ by Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera fooled me into believing that I was looking at the real scientific study. I was delighted by the humor and how this work spoke to me about photography and truth and in Brighton I succeeded. I became an artist of photography.
And then I sold a book on eBay to a photographer and we became email pals. The correspondence was pictorial and engaging. I had the idea to use this life situation for a Master’s degree project. I would make an artist’s book of a love story between two people who have never met in real life but are intimately connected in virtual reality. I worked on it for a year and then it failed…I was still involved with having this long-distance relationship but couldn’t make it work because I had no point of objectivity. It was breaking my heart and my family was being torn apart. I took a year off and went back, but with a different project. I chose a less personal idea. I thought to do something random to make pictures in a random way. What ties them together? How are they packaged? Context or a concept?
So this new idea had something to do with making little experiments or games to prove randomness was a valid concept. I was on a course called Design By Independent Project that ran along side another course called Sequential Design. I wanted to make the point that I am not sequential. I was listless. I was unhappy. Restless and discontent I felt I deserved better. I felt trapped. I asked myself what would I do if I had 6 months left to live?
I took a road trip across America with my dog, Jello. I would travel and make photographs and write stories. Starting in Pennsylvania I bought a Class C motor home. I named it Loretta, after Get Back by the Beatles. I headed for the southwest. The expansive skies of New Mexico were the perfect antidote to 16 years of English weather. A yellow tabby cat appeared from the desert and made himself at home. I call him Chief.
I was on leave of absence from the master’s program and I would have to get back for the start of 2011. I wanted another year. I had been a student at SFAI for 2 terms back in my 20s and had felt comfortable there. The MA course that I studied in England was a design course and not the best fit for me. I was much closer to SFAI than I was to Brighton University. Not just geographically. I told Brighton I wasn’t coming back and made up my mind to apply to SFAI. I carried on in Loretta with Jello and Chief, making pictures here and there, whenever it occurred to me. I photograph anything, a life diary, where I am, what I’m doing, with or without a plan. I’m in no hurry. Direction and rhythm determined by my moods; by the weather; by mechanical error – by life. Right now Loretta is parked in Salinas (full circle) while I make this application to SFAI.
My time studying photography in England has taught me that I thrive in academia. My goal is to get back into an academic world - to immerse myself in a community of creativity, and to find a way for my innate talent and to use what I have learned to help others to express their own selves so that they may find their own unique identity.
“I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all. I am for an artist who vanishes.” - Claes Oldenburg
And I entered a children’s art show when I was 5 years old with a three-dimensional submission. Three birds made from modeling clay resting on a stick of driftwood. It was called it ‘3 Birds on a Log’. I won a first place ribbon and sold my piece for a dollar. I asked the buyer to pay me in 100 shiny new pennies.
Melody Matthews, American, b.1960
