Faculty:

Mel Northum

DRAWING / FOUNDATION
Assistant Professor
(MFA University of North Texas)

office: FA-298
phone: 817-272-5714
email: melban@uta.edu

Artist's Statement

The fluidity of working in the studio—the rapid transfer of action between intrinsic insight and knowledgeable discourse—intrigues me. I like the thought that I am truly an artist when I am creating artwork and more or less a spectator when the piece is finished. This concept keeps me ever eager to enter the studio and reoccurs in two ways. The first comes after struggling with a piece, trying to work out certain problems, like effortlessly cantilevering parts off a wall. When the problem is solved, I fully appreciate that creating is often hard work yet the intensity of the labor is deeply satisfying. And when I speak about my artwork to others my mind returns to those palpable moments of trial and triumph. The memory of the process stays with me when the work is made, even the tactile interaction with materials.

The premise of my artwork relates to the process of creativity— again, that shuffling between intuition and learning and the reliance on both as they blend in a vibrant experience. Neither discipline nor intuition is lost; they remain in a unique consilience.

I am interested in how the sciences of Chaos/Order and Emergence may play a role in the intermingling of intuition and knowledge. Both theorize that certain “events” and “being” are self-assimilating phenomena. In a similar way I often make individual elements without a finished artwork in mind. This allows these essentials to eventually “suggest” a complete work.

My art works become visual poems; meaning that they are concise in form yet expansive in thought, described by subtleties of content and expression. I am captivated by haiku poems—whose brevity combines form, content, and language in a meaningful compact structure—and the enigmatic Japanese koan, of similar crispness in which understanding is abstruse through reason but accessible to intuition. Ultimately I am guided by the poet Wallace Steven’s famous dictum, “the poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

Work