Painter Melissa Weinman is at once deeply traditional and profoundly and quirkily original. All her work, whether in landscape or in representing the human figure, embodies what Joseph Conrad called the primary mission of the artist: “above all, to make yousee.” For Weinman, helping people to see better involves not only teaching them how to look more attentively at the created order, but also challenging them to reconsider their own prejudices. In short, while her paintings are always full of aesthetic delights, more often than not they pose unsettling moral and spiritual questions. Weinman is known for her landscapes and portraits but she has also created an important series of works representing Christian saints in contemporary garb and situations.
Randall Kenan writes of these paintings: “In so many of [Weinman’s] paintings the intial response is that of rote recation to religious iconography: this is a saint experiencing her travail; this is a well-known figure at the moment of metaphorphosis. Yet within the span of a glance, our eye detects the flotsam and jetsam of modern life, and the mind is set afloat.” Kenan goes on to say that Weinman causes those who view her work to question, “what time is it?”
Some of Weinman’s work is featured in Image issue 30. Also read Richard Cole’s review of her found in part 1 here and part 2 here.
Biography
Melissa Weinman was born in Minnesota and paints her skyscapes and naturescapes from memories, photographs and observations from her lake home just ninety miles from her birthplace. She spent the latter half of the 1980s painting skyscapes and waterscapes, sans horizons—looking downward, pushing the horizon off the top of the picture plane. The nineties produced a variety of portraits but two years ago she once again embraced nature—especially land, water, and sky and assigned meaning to the “space” she calls home. Weinman found herself including the horizon, and in fact, letting it play a central role in her work.
“When I was in Hawaii last year,” she writes, “I stood in the Alamo rental car parking lot and framed the seascape with a rectangle made of the thumb and index fingers on my two hands. Trying several differnt views, I sought the view that would yield the strongest illusion of space. To my surprise, I had to narrow my rectangle into a square, placing the horizon dead-center.”
Weinman strives to get a unique view of things making her an original artist with a vision that seems to have been inate. Keep watching for her work to change and grow as she expereinces life and the joys and struggles of motherhood.
Current Projects
July 2003
“Recently I have “rehearsed” an idea or composition with a drawn study before committing to a large canvas. I will sometimes draw a head study of a new model in order to see what the model really looks like before attempting a painting.
“My methods are somewhat traditional. I work on mahogany panel, cotton, linen or paper primed with acrylic gesso and stained with an acrylic wash to make a toned ground. For drawings, I use a burnt sienna wash to get a fleshy tone. The drawings are often grisaille (white and black on a toned ground) which allows me to see a full tonal range very quickly. For painting, I use raw umber for a tone that can look greenish under warm colors, or a warm brown under cool colors. To begin a painting, I draw the composition with monochromatic oil and turpentine line and washes (grisaille) and then work with a full palette from the focal point of the painting outward. I tend to paint in the darker areas first, often translucent, and then work with the lighter and more opaque colors, although if you observed me painting the process appears quite alla prima (done all at once).
“I spend fifty to seventy hours painting each of the models in the large oil canvases. This process takes about six weeks. I spend additional time on each canvas working out the background or painting other props such as Cupid’s wings and draperie. For Saint Lawrence and the Schutzmantelmadonna I made plaster casts of the model in pose, in order that I could clothe the cast and paint the clothes undisturbed for several weeks.”
View her website here.