Exhibition Dates: November 2nd - 30th, 2024
Reception: Saturday, November 2nd, 6:30 - 9:30pm

Aesthetics of Melancholy
New Work by Frank James Meuschke
Years ago I exhibited a plein-air painting depicting a New Mexico pecan grove backlit by a creamy, afternoon winter sky. From piles of burning leaves, thin plumes of blue-white smoke drifted among the trees. The viewpoint was low, but looking upward and westward through colonnades of leafless trees. Mid-exhibit, this painting was stolen from the gallery. I've often reflected on the intensity of feeling a work must summon to have provoked its theft, and have come to think that it was melancholy.
Melancholy is not sorrow nor depression, but is an aesthetic-emotive response to internal or external stimuli. Landscape, a memory, an image, a quality of light, a thought, or even a scent -these things, and others, can trigger or sustain it. Melancholy has a counterpart in the sublime, and both have roots in nature experience and human emotion. Where sublimity is the transmutation of terror into awe, melancholy is the intentional contemplation of transience, things lost, longing or the faint promise of hope; it connects the past with the present, links the painful to the pleasurable, and harmonizes imagination and emotion. Melancholy, like the sublime, is a reflective, higher order experience capable of lifting us above raw emotions; one that processes and synthesizes feeling, memory, imagination, experience, place, and time.
My landscape photographs depict places of personal or cultural significance, all potent sites of melancholy, and are evocative of my artistic influences from American Luminist painters to Gerhard Richter, photographers Edward Steichen to Richard Misrach. With this work I intend to create an experience of melancholy linked to the experience of nature; to synthesize the pleasure of living on this planet with the grief of change.

Website: www.frankmeuschke.com
Instagram: @frankmeuschke
Rosalux Gallery hours are 12-4 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.
The gallery is located at 315 W 48th Street in Minneapolis. Rosalux is always free and open to the public.
Frank James Meuschke works out of his Minnesota studio and has exhibited with Mills Gallery in Boston, Museum of the City of New York, Virginia Commonwealth University Fine Arts Gallery, Portland Museum of Art in Maine, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, Waseca Art Center in Minnesota, and several others. He has been artist in residence at MacDowell, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Weir Farm Art Center, and Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Meuschke has been a recipient of a 2018, 2021, and 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant.
Comments