[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to the martial arts podcast. I'm Rick Marshall. In the last episode, I spoke to cosplay artist Frank Gillen, the Spider man of upstate New York. This time around, I talked to award winning visual artist Melody often, who, whose work is currently featured in a plant themed exhibit at Schenectady's Bear and Bird Gallery.
With spring in full bloom around the region, it seemed like the perfect time to chat with her about her art, plants, and Schenectady's blossoming creative community.
Melody, I first came across your work when I learned about the Kingdom plantae show at the Baron Bird Gallery in Schenectady. With spring coming in, it seemed like a wonderful theme for an exhibit. I was really struck by your work in it and the range of mediums you work in, from illustrating children's books and comics to portraits and murals and all sorts of mixed media projects. Is there a common thread in the projects you take on or how you approach your art?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that my common thread is, I like to think of it as pathos. Like, I'm trying to create emotional authenticity through all of them. So in the painting that you saw, it really had to do with, like, sort of an emotional reality that is very difficult to describe, you know, bringing in all kinds of issues, you know, that I am dealing with in my personal life and also the world at large. My illustrations are like another person's vision, and I'm still trying to get as close to their emotional truth as I can and, like, maybe bring in, like, the arsenal of skills I might have to try to support that. And then in comics, that's the place where I have to be both, like, buttloads of planning and, like, all of this stuff. You know, you're the actor, the director, the lighting guy, the sound guy, you know, like, but at the same time, I'm also still trying to get very personal and get very, like, real. Even though my comics are still fantasy, at least the one I'm currently working on and the ones I have in the works in the future, I would love. My goal is to achieve catharsis and help have other people achieve a catharsis. One of our favorite stories are about helping people to be like, ah, yes, that truth again. It doesn't have to be a new thing. It can be something they've already known. I'm just bringing it back. I want to bring it back again. I want to just join the chorus.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Your work in the exhibit includes some beautiful paintings, including one that really hooked me and had me studying all the little details in it. It's titled a jam jar, more precious than diamonds. And it's this image of a woman sitting sort of across from the viewer at a table. And there are all sorts of other things sort of around her, including a clove of garlic on the table. And there are all these little things that seem to be hidden throughout the painting, and I'd love to know more about it.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so that piece, I was basically had a time constraint, and so I already had a painting I had painted on it previously. One of my hopes. One day, maybe long after I'm dead, they'll do an antiques road show, and they'll be like. And then we x rayed it, and there was this painting underneath.
But anyway, so it was. There was another painting, and then I painted over it because I knew the show was coming up. I was under deadlines, so I was feeling very guilty to go to this painting, but I knew I had to, like, seize this moment for the show. And so I was at that new artistry studios, that nunnery on Eastern Ave. It was previously a nunnery. It converted into artist studios, and it was this great chance to really focus and not have any distractions. And I knew I wanted to do this kind of classical, art historical style painting where you have the table that goes right up against the frame so that you feel like you're at the table with the figure, centralized figure, and then objects and things around it. So it becomes like a narrative painting. I don't know if I was able to achieve my own vision of what I was going for, but I definitely went there, and there was this fun moment where I was like, oh, geez, I don't know if I can. Like, if I work at the scale, she is like, this garlic or this jar, then I'm gonna be spending so much more time that I don't have, like, filling this space to achieve my vision. So instead, I'm just gonna break the rules, and I'm gonna make them enormous. You know, I'm much bigger. Like, the jar that's actually behind her was a very small jar in the window, and I just allowed myself to just kind of put in what I wanted to see. And I think that there are many sort of humps one has to get through when you're in the creative process, you know, like blocks and things like that. And that felt like one of those where it's basically like, I don't care about scale. I'm allowed to do whatever scale I want.
And so that's why some of those things are like that. The figure originally had a smile on her face for a while, she was kind of mischievous, and then at some point, I was just like, smile has to go.
And I painted her with more of kind of, like, I don't know, a little bit of a more downturn expression. And I would have liked, from the affirmation standpoint, like, from the power of attraction standpoint, to create images that are helping people to achieve their higher self and to be able to, like, live with and promote a positive atmosphere. But there's just that thing that calling or that thing that I feel like I need to be emotionally honest. And the honest thing was that I feel sad.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: This is fascinating to hear, because so often, as a viewer, as someone who absorbs the art, we have this impression that artists have the picture in mind, and then they just put it on whatever the medium is, and there's not this sort of changing along the way, all these pivots along the way. That's fascinating to hear.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: You also have some mixed media work in the show, too, including this beautiful little piece with two bottles of seeds and a more complicated piece with layers of painted surfaces and pebbles and other elements. Can you give me some background on those? Because one really stands out in its simplicity, while the other is entirely the opposite, and there's so much going on in it.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for the praise. And that piece that you're describing has, like, bits of some books that I took apart. And I find it very difficult to use old books in my work nowadays. When I was young and in college and everything, you're feeling very transgressive, and you're like, oh, here's this old book I found at the thrift store, and I'm gonna tear it up. I'm gonna put it in my work. And that was during that era, was that first layer.
And now I feel that that's too transgressive for me currently, but I still, I retain it somewhat. And I put a wood panel over top of that, and I painted a little bit more typical to what I do, which is that when I get the chance to paint, I will paint a face, and it's not, I don't know what the face is going to look like. I just know it's going to be a face, and then it just becomes about the color and the emotion.
But I do know that that book that I took apart was an arabic dictionary, and I, there was no disrespect intended or anything. I thought it was beautiful, and I. And I thought, this is really interesting and important. And I like having this fragment of, like, basically a translation of, like, here is this beautiful script, and here are these words so that we can understand them. And I was just like, let's allow people to make what they want from that. Like the unintended or like, the things that come up in your mind when you see such things, you can't predict, you know, like, there's a lot. It's very highly charged. And certainly now, right now, it is also incredibly charged.
[00:08:17] Speaker C: What about the two jars of seeds? Because that was this. I found it to be just beautiful in its simplicity.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, so I obviously love plants. I mean, the show is all about plants. I have, like, over 50 plants in my house that are just, like, cuttings. And I purchased all these heirloom seeds, and my mother and I love to garden. And so those were actually seeds that I collected from plants. And it's kind of this crazy unlocking moment of like, oh, I can actually perpetuate this life form and I can cultivate it and I can get closer to the earth, and I can repair sort of this food thing that we have where it's like, we're disconnected from where the food has come from. And then I had this idea. What if I were to create a library of Alexandria seed library kind of thing? So that's kind of what that piece is evoking is kind of like, look how precious and perhaps commonplace, but it's also like, like, I guess I allude to in the title of the largest piece, which is a jam jar, more precious than diamonds. To me, that is kind of claiming this identity that I have of like, oh, I'm slightly. I have hoarder tendencies according to the Internet, because I cannot throw away a jar because I'm like, this jar. Imagine what we can use it for, you know? And it's also a feeling, like, responsible for pollution and the way and global warming and all of these other things that are attached to this thought form.
And instead of being like, oh, well, I'm going to recoil from that. Instead, I'm going to be like, no, this jar, I value it more than if someone were to try to gift me a diamond, you know, like, this is what we should be valuing.
[00:10:01] Speaker C: There's so much potential in that jar.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: And also trash itself. Like, so many artists that I admire are, like, making work from trash and make reclaiming things. And I think that this is important is that we have a whole system, and that system doesn't always take care of what is left behind, what the aftermath is, what the, what the byproducts are, and that should be a part of it.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the Martial arts podcast. I just want to make sure you know about the Daily Gazette's other podcasts. Gazette columnist Andrew Waite digs into the latest news in his weighing in podcast, while sports editor Ken Schott has been exploring the latest stories in local and national sports for more than 300 episodes in his parting shots podcast. You can listen to both
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[00:11:10] Speaker C: A lot of your work puts human or human like faces front and center. And I know faces can be tricky, from what I've heard, particularly when you want them to convey subtle emotions, not just straight anger or joy or these extremes. There's a lot of that in your work. How do you approach pieces that need to strike that sort of delicate emotive balance and basically become snapshots of a.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Person in a moment?
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, like, my favorite thing. I love doing that. And it can be tricky when it's a real person, obviously, if you're really trying to be faithful. And it's also very. It can be difficult. Say, for example, I am commissioned to do a portrait of someone, and many times it's someone who has passed away. And that's the reason that I'm doing it. And if I learn more about that person and I find out perhaps that they were, it was a very, very, it was a tragedy, then it becomes very difficult to achieve subtle. The subtlety that I can do when it's an individual who has lived a full life and we're, like, saying goodbye. I'm thinking of one example in particular. It was a young woman and her mother. You know, she was hit by a car, and that was, like, the hardest painting ever because it was, I just felt, I felt her mother's pain so much. And also just like the, like, how can you be gone? So it's like, when I paint and when I draw, it is very, like, it's not just shapes anymore, although I am dealing with that. But I'm not trying to say that I'm different in any way. I think that most people who are attracted to depictions of humans and everything, it's because we are seeing ourselves and we want to place ourselves in that situation, or there's some kind of purpose like that. And it's about compassion and it's about empathy at least maybe not compassion always.
[00:13:02] Speaker C: But we've talked a lot about your art here. But I would also love to know what brought you to Schenectady, because I know your art's been exhibited in Washington, DC, in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Illinois. Just going through a long list here. How did you find your way to Schenectady?
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Well, I actually went to high school at Neskuna High School for three years, and I think I actually did a comic contest at the Gazette here, which I really, yeah, years back when I was in high school, I was a very cringe comic, but, you know, I was being a teenager, so my parents live here. My stepfather worked at GE.
He's now retired. And my mother works at Shenandoah High School currently. And she actually was the person who helped write my first comic, you know, that I did as a thesis in college when I was going to Mica in Baltimore. And so now it's just my partner and I came back here to visit family. And then we looked at the stockade and we were like, oh, what if we settled here? And then we ended up getting a different place, moreover, by Central park. But it's really not too far from the city. And there's actually kind of a large creative community here. It's a little bit spread out and sometimes difficult to connect with everyone, but there's a lot of creatives in this region, and it's so beautiful, especially in the summer and the spring.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: I left the region for a while.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: For about ten years or so, and.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: Came back, and I was absolutely shocked by the creative communities that had sort of built up just in that short amount of time in Schenectady and Troy and a few other areas.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: And it's really because obviously, creatives, our most valuable thing for a creative, in my opinion, is our time. And that will often mean that in order to create the time, to create the work that you need, you need to be able to not pay as much to live. And that's this sort of weird metric, and that's why artists and creatives will just flow into areas where, you know, where they can afford it.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Well, you mentioned your affinity for plants earlier, and I think that's something that you and I share. We have a lot of plants around that I really take a lot of joy in. We have this beautiful crab apple in our front yard that's, it's bright pink right now, and we have an orchid that recently bloomed, and it's been going for a while now. And it just fills me with joy every time I look at it. I'm curious, are there some plants in your life right now that are, that are sparking joy?
[00:15:34] Speaker B: Yes. Excellent question.
So I have an avocado tree in my stairwell. It really is up at the ceiling. It's very tall, it's like 9ft or whatever. And I have it in this pot and it's very difficult to get. It's on the landing.
[00:15:53] Speaker C: The inconvenience is worth it.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: I'm sure it is, sort of. And it's very. Because first of all, I've never really had luck sprouting avocado pits. You know, like there, it's just that this one, it came out of the avocado with a little root already growing. And I was like, oh, you wanna. You wanna do it? Okay, let's see if we can do it. And it did. And it's been going for years now. And part of me is like, either I'm gonna have to build a, like a greenhouse where the tree can be planted into the ground and somehow heat it during the cold winter, or I'm going to have to cut a hole in this floor and put its root system in the basement and allow it to continue going. And like, I mean, that's.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: That's ambitious.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: That's really ambitious and weird, but maybe I'll do that.
[00:16:37] Speaker C: That's wonderful. I love that. I have never grown an avocado tree, so that is amazing. Thank you, by the way, for being on the show here, and I love chatting with you here. I do want to know, outside of Bear and Bird gallery, where else can people find your work? Where can they go to look for all of the wonderful things that you're doing?
[00:16:55] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Well, Instagram is where I'm probably the most active, even though I feel like I have been in a little bit of a. Like, I'm working. Like, I'm in the cave in the mountain right now. But yeah, Instagram, melody, often is my handle. And I have my website, melodyofton art, and I will be having a show in Baltimore, inner path, which is like a health, alternative health medicine place during June and July and.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: Yeah, well, that's wonderful.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: We'll look out for it.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: Well, Melody, thank you so much for being on the show with me here today. This has been a fascinating and fun conversation.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: This has been the Martial arts Delegates podcast. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and want to hear more, make sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. And hey, tell your friends about it too. They'll thank you.
For more coverage of the region's arts and entertainment scene, head to Dailygazette.com and Nippertown online.
This episode was produced by me, Rick Marshall for the Daily Gazette. If there's a local art story or artist you'd like to hear more about on this podcast, you can contact me at r. Marshallailycazette.net or via social media.
