Beautiful Words

I am really enjoying Janet Melrose’s solo exhibition, “A Still Life” at Union Gallery.

I am very grateful to arts writer and blogger Jan Patience for this wonderful foreword to Janet’s catalogue:

For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.
Louis MacNeice Apple Blossom, from Collected Poems

I first saw Janet Melrose’s work in 2008 when I was a judge in the now sadly defunct Scottish art award, The Aspect Prize. What first struck me about her painting style, beautiful mark-making aside, was its simplicity. Simple lines. Simple yet striking colour. Simple composition. Seemingly simple subject matter. The natural world was presented through the prism of Janet’s watching eye aligned with her preternaturally poetic mind. Her paintings were all hymns to the beauty of nature. Yet danger lurked in the background. As the Aspect Prize moved on from the initial stage, which saw her selected as one of four artists who would prepare a body of work for a finalists’ exhibition in London six months later, I started to be drawn into Janet’s world. There was something in her work which moved me profoundly. These were not paintings ‘about nature’. They were about our place in a world which constantly shifts and changes. We have bees hovering around vivid blooms, an injured dog adrift by a sign which proclaims danger, butterflies making a beeline for blossom, birds perched on branches minding their own business and furtive foxes slinking through a wood. The world is served up for us here in microcosm. Scenarios are painted in through a process of layering. A matte surface starts to emerge, which she says ‘suits my way of thinking’. Conventionally accepted notions of composition disappear out of her studio window. Janet describes her paintings as being ‘accidents which have waited to happen’. “Sometimes I wonder myself why they take so long,” she adds. I was unaware of it when I first saw her work in 2008, but Janet and her husband had been through a traumatic period coping with the serious illness of their daughter. Being selected for the Aspect Prize represented a turning point after an enforced period of not painting. Returning to the studio as her daughter started to recover, she found her eyes opened up in many different ways. In narrowing her field of vision to the immediate surroundings of her walled garden by the River Earn in Crieff, the creative floodgates opened. Thinking about that now, I can see why I found myself drawn to the way in which she was making sense of her situation, for I too was trying to make sense of my own difficulties, watching the steady decline and fall of my mother’s health just a few years after the death of my father. It is the way of things. Something we all have to go through. There is always danger lurking in Eden. Since childhood, Janet has been an inveterate nature-watcher, but looking at each new work she produces, it seems as though with each new painting, she has just had the dust washed from her eyes For me, therein lies the beauty of this intuitive painter’s work.

JAN PATIENCE
May 2011
www.janpatience.blogspot.com