I have always understood my work to exist somewhere between painting and sculpture.  That is, there are aspects of both that are inextricably linked: flatness and depth; color and matter; transparency, translucency and opacity; light and shadow. The very immanence of any work is dependent upon the simultaneity of various qualities and traits within that work.

Materials have always been a primary interest to me, largely for their particular properties and qualitative differences.  Color in my work is not “applied” in any traditional colorist sense; I don’t regard myself as a colorist “proper”.  Rather, I make use of the color of materials.  Beeswax carries it’s own beautiful goldenness, which when the wax is allowed to cook over time deepens and richens.  Graphite has a particular slick, grey-black hue, a shimmer if left in its natural state or a deep, rich darkness beneath a coat of wax.  White paper and plywood not only vary in color, but also weight, texture and flexibility.  I find the color and textures of ordinary materials infinitely more subtle, varied and indeterminable than applied color. 

While I have always been aware of the properties of materials, I became more so when I introduced a more geometric structure.  It seems that any material’s often-changing, shape shifting, unpredictability becomes more accentuated within a more rigorous format.  The works can give a sense of precision—a taped edge, perhaps, or an internally derived alignment of edges—but in truth they are not precise.  There are imperfections throughout—a ragged edge of paper or wood; an uneven coating of wax; a smudge or dragging of graphite; a translucent spot where the paper became inadvertently too-soaked in wax, a not-flush nail head poking beneath a layer; an off-registered layering of surfaces.  If anything, I try to approach the work with a sense of accuracy rather than precision, the former being more powerful.  Accuracy is about the rightness of the whole entity rather than the fit of its individual parts.  While accuracy does not preclude imperfection, precision does and often at the loss of a sense of the whole.

Ultimately it has been through the process of working with various materials that I have come to understand that I continue to circle primarily around two ideas, though they manifest themselves differently as the work evolves and my materials slowly change.  The first concerns light and it relationship to matter; how matter reveals as much about light as light reveals about matter; how light becomes carved matter and matter carves light; how the two reveal each other’s continual states of change. 

The other idea is best described by Duns Scotus’ term “haecceity”, which refers to that essence of a thing that makes it what it is and unlike anything else, here-ness and now-ness, literally this-ness. That it is the specificity and necessity of a thing that truly allows it to express its own entity.  It is the very qualities of specificity, individuality and necessity upon which art is predicated and that causes it to be such a unique and powerful presence in the world.

Melissa Kretschmer
New York
2006