An Intimate Conversation with Melinda R. Smith

Photo courtesy of the artist

I got to interview Los Angeles based artist, writer, and poet Melinda R. Smith, where she and I discussed her radical use of color, her inspirations, and how she depicts the female body in her artwork. . It was a pleasure to discuss her artistic process. Melinda’s art has been displayed at the Mash Gallery, Post Gallery, and elsewhere.

UZOMAH: You describe colors as being radical, how do you use that radicalness to create art?

MELINDA: Color is its own language. I never studied color theory, and do not bring theory to the canvas, but it’s intuitive nonetheless. The power color has to shift the direction and the mood of any given painting is unmistakable. I am always amazed by the ways in which the slightest shift in color dynamics will completely alter a painting. I’ve often said that if I get the color right, I have the painting. It’s not always as easy as it sounds, and oftentimes, my color choices can as easily ruin a painting as make it. In a very true sense, I begin with color — what will the dominant palette be — and end with it as well. Lately I’ve become more sparing in my use of color, using it more to punctuate than dominate. I think I will spend the rest of my life learning its mysteries. There are times when I am certain I can detect a kind of music coming from it.

U: Poetry describes a scene with words. how as a poet and visual artist can you explain the similarities between creating art and poetry? Which method do you prefer in using to express what you intend to convey with your art?

M: Well, I could probably write an entire book just answering this question. I’ll answer the last part first: I prefer whatever method the muse gives me to work with. Unfortunately, I don’t write poetry anymore, only prose, although my prose tends toward the poetic. Currently, visual art, mainly painting, is my dominant medium. If there are similarities, they exist within the artist rather than the medium, if that makes sense. The compulsion to create, whether with words or paint, is at the root of every work of art. The need, for me, to story tell. What I loved most about poetry was distilling images to their essence and searching for le mot juste. I just loved playing with language and words. I wrote poems about love and heartbreak. When, in my 40s, I grew weary of tumultuous relationships, of having to experience heartbreak in order to write poetry, I stopped and turned to visual art, where my muse does not require me to suffer heartache. In painting, color and line serve similar ends as words do in poetry — the slightest shift in either can cause an entire piece to change. I tell bigger, wider stories in the visual medium than I did as a poet, always women’s stories, but not necessarily as personal. I’m a confessional artist, to be sure, but visually I work more directly with archetypes than I did as a writer. If a painting and/or a poem is successful, maybe the effect it has on its audience is similar, an inward stirring, a recognition of something ancient and truthful, but the means of getting there are very different. Sometimes poems would come to me almost whole-cloth, it was as though I was simply a medium and the words were coming through me, whereas paintings must be built, from the bottom up, laboriously, and you never really know what the result will be. Much of the process is actually a misery, until the end, when the painting finally starts to come together. There was never anything miserable about writing poetry — it was pure heightened existence — except the misery created by the muses I needed in order to write it. That was my own personal occupational hazard.

U: What inspires you? What connection do you have to your art?

M: My art is my life. Every choice I’ve ever made has had my art practice at its center. I wanted to be — and knew I would be — a writer from the time I was about seven years old. It’s a driving compulsion inside me. I must create, it’s not a choice. What inspires me is the fact that art exists at all. It exists to be made, and I’m fortunate to get to make it. There is no separation between myself and my need to create.

“House on many fires”

U: Can you explain your artistic process when you are creating paintings that you refer to as being “nonobjective objective”?

M: I was trying to discover how to take narrative out of my paintings. I am so heavily reliant on it, on story, on figure, I challenged myself with that mandate. I think at the time I was really bored with what and how I’d been painting, and I set out to dismantle it entirely. Usually, I begin a painting with a single figure, something I want to convey or express — I’m fascinated with character, and so that’s usually what I’m after in my work, the depiction of character in whatever form it takes, people, animals, houses, what have you. For me, everything on earth is animate. Once I have the figure, what follows is improvisation — I decide on the painting as I go along, anchored and informed by the object I’m depicting. Once I decided to take that figure away, my entire approach to painting changed in that I suddenly didn’t have an approach. I didn’t know what to do — I was totally lost. It was as though I’d been thrown into an existential void from which there was no escape. Who was I without narrative? If there was no object, no figure in the painting, how on earth would I know how to even enter a painting, let alone work within it? I had emptied the canvas, emptied the stage, as it were, and tried to make paintings that were objectless, without resorting to the by-now somewhat cliched marks of abstract expressionism. I don’t do it well enough to justify even the slightest appropriation (I learned this the hard way) of its language. So that was not available to me. I had no map, no blueprint. But what I eventually discovered was that the absence of object then became the object — it was form and space, simply. As soon as marks were made, the distinction between the two was established. If there was to be a painting, there had to be form, and even if the form took no recognizable shape, that form was still object, and everything outside of it was not the object, thereby reinforcing the sense or idea of object-ness as it relates to space. And so that became the story. As I saw it, it was the story of storytelling. The space in which the story was told was the story. I simply couldn’t get away from it. I called it nonobjective objective both because it was my objective to make nonobjective paintings, and because my nonobjective paintings were still objective. Eventually, I returned to figurative work. It was an interesting, oftentimes excruciating exercise, but I can’t say it lead to any breakthroughs. I am not an abstract painter.

U: Since focusing on painting more, how has your artistic perspective changed or evolved?

M: It’s expanded. It’s funny. I spent about 40 years exclusively writing — I came to painting late. In all that time, I never really considered myself to be a storyteller. Primarily I was a poet, and what a poet conveys through poetry is different than novelistic storytelling. In other words, I did not need to be a storyteller as a poet. The stories I told within my poems — and of course I always told stories — were in service to the poetry and not the other way around. It was incidental that the poems were also stories. It was only once I began painting that I came to see how strong the storytelling strain is within me. It was only then that I was finally able to see that I am, indeed, a storyteller. Not the medium I would have predicted would have told me that, but there you have it. Paint never ceases to be magical.

U: Who are some artists and writers who have influenced your work?

M: I no longer have the same taste for literature as I once did. In my younger years, I devoured it, I lived inside its walls. I learned to write by two methods only: reading and writing. It’s the only way — one has to teach oneself. No one but yourself can lead you to your own voice. There are three writers who had the greatest influence on me as a young writer starting out. They were: Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, in that order. I discovered Kerouac in high school. He was the first writer who filled me with the unignorable urge to do what he did, with his stream-of-conscious, documentarian style. The first time I read Lawrence, I was ignited, and I just kept thinking, Yes and yes and yes. The rough, irrepressible passion he brought to his writing was palpable, and it moved me to want to do the same. Finally, the greatest of the three, Virginia Woolf, with her ethereality — her style of writing, the way she wrote, I wanted to achieve something similar. To the Lighthouse was seminal for me. After that, the influences came pell mell into my life, with Joyce, I’d say, leading the pack. Of course, the list goes on and on, and I haven’t even mentioned the poets who were so meaningful to me, including T.S. Eliot, James Merrill, Yeats and Plath, to name a few. Also, I took William Carlos Williams’s adage, “No ideas but in things,” as gospel truth. I still do.

I taught myself how to paint in the same way that I taught myself how to write. I studied paintings, and I painted. Those painters who influenced me were many, depending on what phase I was in in my learning process. Early on, the expressionists had a huge influence on me, as did a lot of outsider art. More recently, I’d say the artist who inspires me more than anyone is the multidisciplinary Louise Bourgeois. In fact, a couple years ago, I was convinced she was present with me in my studio for a particularly heightened period of time when I was making work inspired by her. I had seen a show of hers at Hauser Wirth, here in Los Angeles, some simple pieces she had made, red words painted on paper, “The Red Sky,” I think it was called, and they hit me like lightning and inspired some of the most interesting and unusual work I’ve done. But the one artist whose work speaks most directly to me is Rothko. I can’t know for certain whether he’s influenced me as a painter or not, because the space of the object, his color field, my empty stage, is very much at the heart of myself. I haven’t mentioned it, but I was also a playwright, and the empty stage on which stories unfold is an important, sacred space to me, I use it symbolically in painting quite often, and these spaces are related to Rothko’s color fields. I’m going to say his influence worked quietly and steadily on me from the time I was a young woman, long before I knew I would end up being a painter — I remember encountering one of his paintings at the MOMA in my early 20s and just being stopped by it. A couple years ago, I had a couple of my nonobjective paintings in a show, and someone who saw them called me a literal Rothko. I liked that.

“My Aim Is True”

U: How do you use art to describe the female body and give it a different narrative?

M: I wouldn’t be the first painter in the history of art to find the female body endlessly interesting as a subject, but I do. And since I actually have a female body, I have a lot of access to reference it. These paintings are all about the female gaze. There’s a kind of feedback loop with women painting women’s bodies: We are both gazing at ourselves, and looking out at the world gazing at us. Sometimes it feels slightly transgressive, making larger-than-life nudes, oftentimes self-portraits, for the world to gaze at. I would never personally stand naked for the world, but I do by proxy sometimes, when the mood strikes. Lucky for me, I’m not a photorealist painter.

My mother was in my studio once, when I was on a nude kick, and she asked me why I painted so many nudes and why the bodies were always so messy. My response was that the female body is messy. It bleeds, it sags, it bulges, it does all sorts of unbecoming things which, in the aggregate, are usually beautiful. My depictions are not objectifications — were I to paint the male nude, I would absolutely objectify him, and he would have richly earned it. But the women I paint breathe all on their own, and they don’t require you for anything. They are self-possessed, with or without an audience, having fought so hard to fully own their life. I often depict the female body with cuts over the heart, where the heart has been torn out, with surgical scars, with windows into inner absences, mismatched breasts, unevenness and asymmetry and lines that go nowhere, all, to my eye, pretty accurate. We are the sum of our experiences, and, as women, we are given the greater share of pain, I think. But we are also given the greater measure of strength. That’s what I hope my nudes convey.

U: What are some of your goals with your art you have not pursued yet and want to?

M: Gosh. I had several things scheduled for 2020, all of which were killed by the pandemic. As I like to say, 2020 is where my career went to die. I look forward to being able to show in galleries again. Actually, I look forward to just being able to go to galleries again. I miss seeing art in person. When we view paintings digitally, we’re only looking at degraded, impoverished versions of themselves. Paintings live in person, and it’s the only proper way to experience them. In one sense, the pandemic gave me something rare and wonderful: It permitted me to hole up in my studio for the entire year, without interruption of any kind, to follow the thread of my work wherever it took me. I’ve enjoyed that. I’ve spent all of 2020 recording the experience of lockdown and social isolation, through painting, illustration, and writing, so when this is over, I’d like to pull everything together to tell a comprehensive, multidisciplinary story of what it was like. Of course, everybody has their own story to tell, their own experience of this terrible year, but not everyone makes art from it. My hope would be that my experience, as told through art, would resonate with others. Beyond that, it’s difficult right now to see into or plan for the future, as it seems sometimes as though we’re living in a futureless world. I find myself in the strangest state of not really wanting anything. I’m fortunate to get to make art every day, and that’s all I’ve ever really needed.

“The anxiety of influence”

U: What has been a defining moment in your career in art or writing or both?

M: Every first is a defining moment, I think. The first poem I got published; the first book I wrote; the first successful painting I made; the first time someone accepted a painting into a show; the first solo show; the first sale, etc. After I graduated college, I spent some time in Europe. At that point, I was really struggling with the idea of what I was going to do with my life, career-wise. This was in the 1980s, and people were going into finance and other lucrative jobs, careers that held absolutely zero interest for me. But the pressure to land on a “career” was strong. One day, I was in a monastery in Arles, France, sitting on an ancient tomb, and I asked myself, “If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?” The answer was swift and clear: Write. And that was that. I knew with certainty that that was what I was going to do, and it set the course for the rest of my life. So I would say that was a pretty defining moment, albeit one almost as ancient as the tomb I sat on.

U: What advice can you give to a young poet/writer who wants to pursue painting also?

M: My advice would simply be to do it. Follow your ideas, see them through. If they take you to another medium, so what? It’s just another way to express yourself. Many artists work in multiple disciplines. One simply isn’t enough to hold everything they have to express. I think it’s a sign of the strength and insistence of their talent. When it comes to your art, never let anybody tell you that you shouldn’t. In fact, if someone says you shouldn’t, that’s a pretty good indication that you should. Finally, I would tell any young artist to leap into the scary and sometimes unfamiliar waters of believing in yourself. If you don’t, no one else will.

You can find more of Melinda's artwork on Instagram and her Website.