Interview: Kreh Mellick

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing artist Kreh Mellick. Mellick received her BFA in Illustration at Maine College of Art and spent two years on fellowship at Penland School of Crafts in the mountains of North Carolina. She recently returned from an artist residency in Iceland, and now lives and works in Asheville, North Carolina.

Mellick’s drawings are sparse. Instead of backgrounds her pieces have expanses of white, upon which she paints thin, spartan figures in greys and blacks and sometimes reds and pinks. Occasionally there are animals—zebras, horses—but many pieces contain only human figures, often women, simply dressed and with opaque facial expressions. Basically, the drawings are stark, making me think of seascapes, fog, barren landscapes and tough, weathered people. Despite the simplicity, or perhaps because of it, the figures in Mellick’s pieces are full of character, and the emotional weight in her pieces is consistently strong—they are often quite tense. The patches of floral pattern that burst out here and there serve sometimes to temper and sometimes to enhance the wild, moody, stillness of the works.

Captain's Wife Photo Credit: Elizabeth Hartsig

I'm really taken with your characters' hair. In Ghostly Hair Pull, one figure has braids wrapped almost like bandages around her head. She is pulling at the long gray hair of another figure. In Captain's Wife, the captain's wife has incredibly wild, thick, wind-blow hair. It really shapes my sense of her personality. Can you talk a bit about hair in your art?

The hair is really a part of the characters themselves. I never really plan the drawings before I sit down to draw them. I generally start with a face and everything that comes after is a just an attempt to find what will be the most honest interpretation of that character. In the captain’s wife, her hair is about texture and building depth… it had to be that way for her flat face to have life and to pop from the paper. In Ghostly Hair Pull, I love big braids because the length of hair represents time passed. This character is the ghost in this piece, and her long hair more or less represents the things she has seen over time.

Ghostly Hair Pull (left) and close-up (right)

The ghost is doing the hair pulling?

Yes, the ghost is in red, which I was using to represent ghosts for a little while. Like in machine diagrams in old books; in the diagrams black is used to represent the constant, while red usually signifies the moving piece or a dashed line. So in one series of work, the black characters represented the living and the red was the un-constant: the ghost.

There are these flying heads that appear in many of your drawings—little heads framed with wings. You have referred to them as “harbingers of death”, or alternatively as spirits connected to specific characters like protectors. I’m especially curious about your comment that they have some “religious connection.” Can you tell me more about that?

I really love these characters. That love affair is still there. I stopped drawing them for a while, but just included them in a large drawing I have in Asheville. They still mean something to me. I think I interpret them as religious because they are not human, so they are otherworldly. That is about as I far as I go with religious matters; something that is unreal, unexplainable but gives a feeling of wonder, protection or evil intent. Inspiration came for those from old gravestones, that have skeleton heads with wings, so cool looking! Also, an Italian renaissance painting, I once saw at the Arthur Saeckler Museum at Harvard? … there are literally bald angel heads with wings, I love them!. The look like flying baby heads, angels, religion.

Can you tell me a bit about the animals that are in some of your pieces? Zebras, oxen… You’ve spoken about the tin animal molds that decorated your childhood home; are the animals in your art inspired by this, or do they come from someplace else? What do they represent, and what is their relationship with the people they interact with?

I love to think of animals as having very human qualities, wiser counterparts. In fables, they teach us lessons. In any story about animals, we give them human qualities, allowing ourselves to be very wild.

My mom used to tell me that the barn owl, from the silo down the road, brought my birthday cake every year. In fact, just recently I found a note from the barn owl, written to ‘little’ me, in my dad’s hand, the owl wished me happy birthday and such. This story became such a part of my childhood that I have memories of seeing that barn owl. I love that story. I like to think that animals come in and out of our lives like this.

I’m interested in the nudity and partial nudity in some of your drawings. In A walk with Mother, the younger woman is lifting her skirt up past her waist, looking straight ahead without expression. In addition, there are several topless figures in your work. Can you explain the role of nudity in these drawings?

I think the nudity is part vulnerability and part extroversion. The feeling of being stuck in a room naked, but also you are being forced to look at me, because I am naked in this room. Perhaps, I want to be naked and perhaps I arranged it to be so. The character is sensitive and nervous, but still wants to be seen?

A walk with Mother

In one of your pieces, part of a series, a topless, bearded man stands in front of an iron. It seems such a strikingly different inclusion, the iron, and thus fascinates me. It makes me realize how rarely objects appear in your art. Is there a reason for this?

I love this little series, because it is so foreign to a lot of the other work. This series shows a man, on a kind of journey. He sets off, he is visited by a prophet, and then he receives his fortune, an iron. In one breath we put the iron on a pedestal. What a great tool, how we rarely consider it. But also, how ridiculous is our need for objects and ‘having’ things.

There is a decorative aspect to your art, in the bits of wallpaper and other patterns that appear in many of your pieces. In your most recent show, Some. Things. Curious., a collaborative show with Kimberly Convery at Space Gallery in Portland, ME, the walls were covered with your handmade wallpaper. Are you attracted to decorating in a more general sense, outside of your artwork?

I really love walking into someone’s home. Seeing how they chose to fill their personal space. I would practically open people’s drawers, if they would let me. Fascinating. And so I love to think of layers of unspecific unrelated decorating; a modge-podge of things that people chose, and how they become arranged.

I’ve noticed that you tend to think of your art in terms of mood. You have indicated that patterns and wallpaper bits in your art represent a mood of “loving someone far away.” I’m curious about your choice to juxtapose this mood with a more catty, aggressive mood in the piece Domestic Dispute. Can you talk about this juxtaposition?

I suppose we are all made up of our quiet moments and our louder moments. This pattern serves as a context for something a bit more violent. This interaction might not seem so wild if there were not a quiet moment to frame it. Thus, perhaps it isn’t as violent; so much as day to day.

Where do you work? What is your workspace like?

I have a new studio… with a great big ol’ desk. I basically need a desk and a couple of walls and a sink. I have had studios and have worked at home. I usually have tea cups that hold varying degrees of water for gouache washes, scattered about. And a stack of books for reference.

There is such a strong current of folklore, ghost stories, and the like in your work. What stories from your childhood do you hold close?

The barn owl story was a big one. There were lots of magical stories growing up and I loved hearing stories of my family’s history. Collecting names and places for them. I loved fairy tales. The town I grew up in had a group of older women that lived in fabulous homes with painted walls. One house my family would house-sit for weeks on end had an old stage in the attic with a box of dress up clothes. It was such a magical place.

Do you feel as though you are part of a tradition?

no.

You have stated that your characters “arise” after you sit down to draw. How does this work?

I think this comment speaks mostly to my process. Like anyone’s individual process. I do not plan what the characters will look like or even the precise stories that will arise, when I sit down to work. So my drawings tend to come forward as I draw. There are certainly ideas or moments that inspire me TO sit down to work. I find that when I try to make a plan…it falls quickly away. I love this. I love that consistently, I will try to make something premeditated and fail, but with that failure there is something new to be found. That is the most wonderful feeling.

Much of your pieces seem part of an imagined world. Do you think of each piece as part of it’s own imagined world, or are some of your pieces part of the same imagined world?

I think that these characters and the situations they find themselves in, are all different interactions within a conversation. Just as we might go through a single day, having a handful of interactions; each inherently different, but tangled within that our own daily narratives.

I suppose I feel rather wrapped up in these characters that I create…and so the fun is finding what happens amongst them. I suppose I do retreat into them, though it feels very natural. They are in the same world…but may never know it.

Have you noticed any new motifs or characters cropping up in your art?

Hmmm... I want to start drawing more tigers!

See more of Kreh's work on her blog. And check out a great interview she did with Dee Clements of Paper Crane.