Exhibition Dates: November 2nd - 30th, 2024
Reception: Saturday, November 2nd, 6 - 9pm
Aesthetics of Melancholy: New Work by Frank James Meuschke
Years ago I exhibited a painting depicting a grove backlit by a creamy, late afternoon sky of a New Mexico winter. From piles of burning leaves, plumes of blue-white smoke drifted between the trees. The viewpoint was low, but looking upward and westward, through rows of leafless pecan trees. This painting was taken from the gallery wall by a viewer. I've often reflected on the intensity of feeling a work must summon to provoke its theft, and have come to think it was melancholy.
Melancholy is not sadness, sorrow, nor depression, but is an aesthetic-emotive response to internal or external stimuli. Landscape, memory, an image, a quality of light, a thought, or even a scent -these things, and others, can trigger or sustain it. Melancholy has its 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.
These landscapes depict places of personal significance and are evocative of my artistic influences from American Luminist painters to Gerhard Richter, photographers Edward Steichen to Richard Misrach. I intend to draw connections between melancholy and our contemporary 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.