20 May 2025

Recently I wrote on the back of a painting:
There is only one
desire in spring:
yellow

Today I went to buy large planters.
I was looking for yellows (like the color of this painting)
I walked past all the pansies.
The radiant cultivars.
And headed straight for yellow. Big stacked pots making shapes.


I was remembering something the artist, Tal R, said: He was an opportunist looking for chances. And sometimes it starts with a banal attraction. And the chance is a thing to riff on. To play with, to be an artist with.

I found my pots and then wandered through the cactus tent. I longed for every carefully handled exotic in there. Their shapes moved me.

And then I did something I never do, I walked into the rock shop. My heart did heave. These luminous colors, craggy shapes, sparkling minerals come out of the earth ? And are $5. Yes please. I bought a rainbow fluorite and optical selenite, citrine, and canadian amethyst. And they are sitting at my window sill now. I look over on this grey day and see them holding light.

I was never a big rock picker-up-er, but recently on my long morning walks, I've been keeping an eye out for shapes and hand feel in certain rocks. The desire for earth and solidity makes sense right now, and I am colliding with their mystery.

I'm heady with spring.

I'm setting a table for friends.

I'm adding new painting every week.

Thank you for checking in.

This new piece, Ariela, Butterflies and M, is inspired by botany, flowers, the desire of a dune, the ceramics of Ariela Nomi Kuh and the paintings of Elizabeth Blackadder and Matisse, the objects collected on a walk, and the sheer marvel of light and air.
melanieparke.com/artwork/5362285-Ariela…

www.ankceramics.com/

20 March, 2025

In the 2010's I showed with a gallery in Chicago, called slow. It was a quiet, understated apartment gallery, driven by concept and radically anti-commercial. The shows could be audacious and funny, serious, political and timely, and sometimes an inside joke that for those outside the joke would find infuriating. Often the shows, because they were prompted by ideas, would bring two or three artists together. Bringing their work in relation to each other had a way of expanding on a question of assumptions, rather than emphasizing the obvious. I loved this gallery because it kept throwing windows and doors open to thinking more and thinking with.

Anyway, I was thinking about slow the gallery recently, because slowness has been my own central way of being for all my life. As I prepare for a solo show next year, I have been trying to think through the particulars of my own process. What tics I keep repeating, what lack I am compensating for, what ideology I am asserting.

This new painting was fun. With images from Louisa Matthíasdóttir and Paula Modersohn- Becker, I was reminded of how I have carried postcards and art books with me to every place I have ever lived since I was an art student. Lugging milk crates of books up flights of stairs has always been worth every. slow. step. I was carrying my friends, my companions. My mentors, my confidants. Paintings on the page that once seemed ephemeral, have since solidified in my memory, and are now baked into my own paintings. The questions and conversations with them continue and continue and continue. And I realized I am collecting imagery representative of care, of tenderness, of nostalgia, qualities so difficult to articulate or hold. But still, they are material stuff that links my eyes to invisible bonds. A desire to be with. A practice of a lifetime of attentiveness and observation. An affection for slowness.

Paula, Louisa & Two Flowers oil on canvas 40x30 2025

5 new paintings recently uploaded on my site here melanieparke.com/section/505697-Interio…

slow the gallery is still rockin it, cultivating relationships and collaborating on curatorial projects in the Chicago area www.slow.gallery/

Paula Modersohn-Becker, I am Me exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9592/paula-mo…

More on Louisa Matthíasdóttir louisamatthiasdottir.com/

29 January 2025

I just added some new paintings, my friends. This one was really fun to be in, just immerse in the frenetic energy of wings, glorious wings and grasses.

Grass is for Wings
42x38
o/c
2025
melanieparke.com/artwork/5341506-Grass%…

Monday, 10 January, 2025

The climate, that is what we are watching now.

The birds above and the small things below. The delicacies which are our friendships.

January 9, 2025

Puma
28x22
o/c
2025

Just stepped outside in 17 degrees to photograph this new one, which holds a raw power in it's straight forward clarity and rich texture. I had more plans for it, a postcard and little objects resting on the shelf, but as it floated it's arms to me, I waved back, and said ok, there you are.

added to available interiors melanieparke.com/artwork/5334758-Puma.h…

January 7, 2025

Thank you for finding me here! I will start writing more after a pause to heal from the abrupt departure from Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. I feel time is mine again, and a great relief. More soon.