The Illuminated Art
of
Melissa Nolan
McDougall
Melissa Nolan
McDougall
Way to Blue
Pencil on Paper - 30
w x 20 cm h
The
experience of viewing Melissa Nolan McDougall’s artworks conjures memories of
walking into an old cathedral where the dark interior of the church is
illuminated by the radiant beauty from the sun’s rays piercing through the
coloured stained-glass windows presenting a sort of warm phantasmagorical
experience.
The
aforementioned soft prismatic glow of sunlight within the darkened church space
creates an atmosphere of wonderment, especially as one can waft through such
ephemeral splendour whilst enjoying of the coloured shards of glass cascading
onto oneself within this cruciform designed building engendering a wonderful
sensation.
The
dark arts, as evidenced within McDougall’s artworks, are not dark in any
negative way but provide a visual path along which to travel with the
illumination of the senses yielding a space where contemplation of the
surrounding worlds is slowed down. This allows for analysis of the information
to be distilled to enhance one’s qualities of life.
Civilizations
have long used the dark of night for enlightenment from sources such as the
moon, stars and any other solar phenomena that they may experience, each epoch
with its peoples searching for some sort of partial resolutions as to why they
exist and where they are going; this is a natural quest and desire.
McDougall
is engaged in her own unique quest for some kind of personal illumination and
enlightenment through drawn/painted motifs as exemplified in the title of the
drawing above: Way to Blue. Both
self-portrait and floral still life, seemingly exists in omnipresent space
without the shackles of time attached to it, apart from the human constructed
clock time.
To
assign McDougall’s artworks to one category or another is difficult because
they virtually defy classification. There is a kind of resonating
phenomenological presence that appears to emanate from them which intensifies
the complexities of her works so that, in viewing them, it is almost like
looking at some sort of transcendent mercury that collides with the senses and
resonates in the far reaches of human consciousness of love, sadness, family,
nature and happiness with the overall thematic feeling of enlightenment.
However, this does not act in any deterministic manner but rather offers a
retreat through which to move forward from aspects of contemporary desires that
clog and fog the human mind.
If
creating art as a sanctuary within the human consciousness is the raison d’étre
for McDougall’s artworks, then she has been very successful in creating a space
for the human mind to engage and relax in peace, thus making her work all the
more contemporary within the modern anxieties of the contemporary community’s
societal memory.
Dr
Peter Davidson
Painter