There are only two days remaining—today and tomorrow—to see Melissa Messer’s paintings at Spectrum Fine Art, a gallery tucked in Madrona along a commercial strip that’s currently being inundated by a fury of autumnal color.
Hanging in the gallery window, visible from the street, is a small painting titled A Pair of Roman Dogs. It’s a mere 12 inches square, but I can’t stop thinking about the pathos packed into such a diminutive image. Against a backdrop of deep, murky olive, one of the dogs pops, rendered in lemony yellow and shades of acrid, bilious burnt gold. The shadows across its face are formed by a series of spare brushstrokes (you can count them: seven) in ochre and mustard. A single, steady brushstroke in muted brown forms the mouth, turning up at the edges in a slight smile. I think it’s a smile?
The second hound, a dusty, earthen mauve teetering on aubergine, sits behind the first in a gesture like a caress, its head and snout resting on the other’s back. Its hand—because this is where the dog seems almost to become human—rests on the golden shoulder of its companion. A cool blue blush of light glances off both.
The image is tender, conveying something like belonging and companionship. Yet the acidity of the color strips it of any saccharine, doggy-in-the-window sentimentality. Whether it contains some deeper meaning is almost beside the point. As an exercise in art for art’s sake, it’s a really fucking satisfying painting.
Interestingly, A Pair of Roman Dogs is the only piece in the show of new works currently hanging at Spectrum that features non-human figures. The rest depict human bodies in various configurations, either reposed or arrested mid-motion against swaths of color that are constantly surprising in their fresh weirdness. There’s really no other way to put it. Like the jarring icy cobalt and ink black of Night Diver No. 2, Search, and Rescue, or the more mellow but still-bracing blues and browns of Ice Age and Landlocked. (You can see them all here.)
Part of Messer’s brilliance lies in her use of color, which sometimes seems to turn the figures into foils for color play. And she embraces it, self-identitifying as “if Rothko’s daughter were obsessed with form.”
To get deeper into her brain, I asked Messer a few questions about process and practice.
Walk me through the birth of a painting. Where does the process begin—with an image, a feeling, a relationship, a color, or something else?
MESSER: It starts with a feeling in the body that becomes a theme. Like a pose I’m taking over and over in my life and I really get into the psychology and emotion of it. In early motherhood, I was bending over and kneeling constantly with a small child. It keeps your knees sore and compresses your lungs. It’s something you do to engage closer. It’s intense, tender, tedious, and at times ecstatic. Think of these poses as shapes—a Kneeler, a Diver—they become symbols for what? Humility, labor, surrender. But also devotion and service. A few years later, the theme is different. There is a persistent pause before getting up. Taking a beat for myself, like in Pre-War Champagne and Ice Age. These positions, when distilled and repeated, become symbols of resilience, repair, and needing to finish one bleeding thought.
What comes first: the figure or the color?
MESSER: Figure! If my paintings were songs, the figures are the lyrics and the color is the music. I take figure shapes, and I think about all the ways they manifest somatically and I write music for those images. Which is to say, I compose harmonies, disharmonies, and rhythms through color to evoke the emotion.
How do you think about color’s relationship to emotion? Are you using it to elicit a particular feeling, or are you more interested in its purely optical effects?
MESSER: Yeah, the color isn’t everything but it’s everything at first. It’s emotional and visceral. It’s the impact before you enter the painting. In my favorite paintings, I’m confronted with color that sets the tone before I enter. Not even in a loud way. But there is communication happening before your brain gets involved. I’m always after that impact moment before you dive in.
I love the description: as “if Rothko’s daughter were obsessed with form.” What is it about Rothko’s work that works for you, and do you have a favorite piece?
MESSER: Thanks for asking this. It changes all the time! Whatever it’s doing, it’s spiritual. I was born in Houston, not far from the Rothko Chapel. Rothko is the household name among a group of mid-century American colorists that includes Milton and March Avery. They are my North Stars for color work. I try to build from them. Matisse is the painter that made me want to be a painter. And Hilma af Klint showed me you can investigate meaning through color. Alice Neel showed me how to look at your friends without blinking.
What does “not blinking” mean, in practical terms?
Neel painted the people in her life with a gaze that is both irreverent in its humor or lack of idealism, but also reverent in its intimacy and close-looking. I love this quality in relationships. It’s this feeling of being so close that it feels expansive. It’s a radical kind of intimacy. I paint my friends, we collaborate on physical experiences. We hold each other’s infants hours after birth. How does it show up pictorially? Well there’s a lot of empathy and deep seeing in the process. And I know that I couldn’t make paintings without it.
Speaking of your friends, who are the subjects in your paintings and how do you choose them?
MESSER: Oh, what a treat to get to talk about Ruth! I only paint my close friends. But mostly, I paint Ruth Bryan. She’s a dancer, a therapist who works with intimacy and embodiment, and very recently a mother. My own mother has asked if paintings of Ruth are self-portraits and I think that is owed a little to our shared hair texture and high cheekbones, but mostly to Ruth’s talent as a physical communicator. She can inhabit my symbolic experience while expressing her own.
How do you work with her to develop those poses? And how much of a painting is determined before you begin versus discovered along the way?
MESSER: I have these shapes I’m sketching all the time. I bring them to Ruth and we set them up like Pose A, Pose B, Pose C. And then we let the camera roll. She moves slowly through this sequencing and we find these transitional positions along the way that are off-kilter somehow and express something much closer to life while still maintaining a symbolic quality. I don’t want her to look like a statue. “The breath of life” is crucial even when I’m playing with abstraction or symbolism. Rather, especially then!
Your paintings hold a lot of tension between abstraction and physical presence, between flattened planes of color and the weight of a body. How does your interest in sculpture—and in antiquity, more broadly—inform your approach?
MESSER: God, I love sculpture! In another life I’m a sculptor. In my head I am one. This is where Rothko’s color fields come in. I think of a figure like a sculpture and I try to take as few cuts as possible to give me the largest planes possible to make color fields on the body. Sometimes there’s a lot of tension in a shoulder or the core and I need to chisel down for that detail to communicate the emotion in the figure. But mostly I try to limit the cuts and expand the color. Sometimes this leads to full-on abstraction. I think of myself as a contemporary painter who works in that tension between the modern colorists who flattened everything and antiquity, which imbued everything with physicality and weight. I love heft. Hockney said “Without form there is nothing.” I get that.
And the dogs…who are they? What are they?
Yes, ok the dogs, the outliers, the scamps. They are a Roman sculpture piece from the 2nd century found in the foot of Italy’s boot. I experiment with form and color ideas on abstract forms, blobby cylinders. But sometimes I use these dogs as a shorthand. What’s funny about them to me is that these Italian greyhounds don’t ring especially symbolic. The sculptor makes them almost human. There is something so compelling about their relationship.
