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Catalyst

Cecil Collins’ Teaching

I was very fortunate to have Cecil come to my college once a week to teach. I studied with him from 1985-1989 and the drawings in this section were made in those classes. His method chimed in with something that I was trying to achieve – a letting go to obtain something more sensitive than the conscious mind alone could achieve. His technique with its multiple “instruments” (Chinese brushes, quills, reed pens, red chalks, charcoal and pencils), combined with the use of left and right hand, mouth, foot, movement, music and a usual maximum of one minute poses, meant I would get confused and surrender my previous means of control. As Francis Bacon said in his interviews with David Sylvester

"They come over without the brain interfering with the inevitability of the image. It seems to come straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it – which is its freshness”

I found the concurrent use of both hands very useful as it trained both sides of the brain – the left and right - to co-operate, creating a harmonious union of the analytical and intuitive. I enjoyed this alchemy of creating and communicating something in unexpected ways.

“I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks.”F.B .

Through making these drawings, I got in touch with a desire to communicate the “other” whatever that may be; a sense of the timeless, the divine, the soul, the essence. Not from a religious perspective, but from a connection to the archaic, through memory, ancestry, the collective unconscious……. The Colour and Curve series was born from this and it was, I feel, more effectively communicated in the Loss paintings, leading into Manifestations, my current work.

N. B. It may seem strange to quote Francis Bacon in the context of Cecil Collins as they were spiritually and ideologically diametrically opposed. However, I studied them simultaneously, and found them both to have a similar concern with finding methods of accessing the subconscious.

Colour & Curve

Melissa Alley: Colour and Curve by Mary Rose Beaumont, April 2000

“ The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” John Ruskin “The Stones of Venice”, vol ii, ch.5

Colour, glorious colour is the most striking property of Melissa Alley’s paintings. She starts relatively modestly in the early work with a gentle glissando for brushstrokes; in the most recent work the various strands of symphonic colour rise to a dizzying crescendo. But let it not be thought that is a question of hit or miss. She does not plan her composition in advance, but as soon as the first notes are struck, so to speak, she has her pitch and the painting evolves almost organically under her brush.

Inside Out, 1997, is one of the most exciting of this early group. The figure is there for all to see, exposed to the viewer, but round it and through it lick the elemental flames which both destroy and renew. There is a sense of figure and ground, the ground perhaps a tawny landscape with clumps of green trees over which she has imposed the discipline of a linear figure. Yet there is a sense of something bubbling up inside – a cauldron of human emotions that no lid can keep sealed. The contrasting colours of the spectrum help to achieve an overall harmony – green shading into red, which in turn becomes a glowing orange. She uses the same colours, although in almost exactly the opposite way, to effect a similar harmony in Frisson, 1997,which has a sense of energy and movement pulsating through it. I am reminded with these figures of Rodin, who liked to have dancers wandering through his studio, so that he could catch a quick turn of the body and capture the fleeting moment on paper. Frisson is especially interesting because the artist made the work with her eyes shut, as an intuitive rather than a preconceived composition. In many of the drawings there are two figures, which immediately set up a dialogue, sometimes tense and strained, sometimes warm and affectionate. In this particular case the viewer has to ask him/herself: Are they turning away from each other or have they just been reunited? It should be remarked that Alley’s figures are nearly all women, perhaps because to be true to herself she can only be sure of female emotions and behaviour.

A solemn ritual is being enacted in Entities in Procession, 1998-00. The archetypal figures move slowly across the picture plane. It might be seen as part of a great Last Judgement, with the figures descending into limbo or, in a more pagan light, as a group processing towards an unseen sacrificial altar. The central figure is the focal point of the group, slightly set apart from the others, perhaps an act of worship. Certainly she may be connected with Gaea, Mother Earth, literally the most solid of the figures apart from the armless, headless statue to her right reminiscent of the Venus de Milo. The other figures are mysteriously transparent and the landscape may be seen through and beyond them, offering an interplay between positive and negative space.

Alley describes her work as being “on the cusp between abstraction and figuration”, and nowhere is this truer than in the most recent paintings in mixed media on wood which possess, in common with early pioneering Kandinsky, the quality of metamorphosis from figuration into abstraction and back again. If there is a metaphor to be discovered in this paeon of praise to colour it is that the death of painting is greatly exaggerated.

Installations

Colour and Beat

These pieces, comprising 4 x 4 x 3/4 inch wooden tablets placed in grid formation, are concerned with exploring and manipulating the spacial and rhythmical qualities of colour and light within a rigorous structure. Music has always inspired me and these pieces are my expression of its fluidity and its underlying structures and constraints.

The Colour Fugues are site-specific installations. All five facets of the tablets are painted with different hues of colours that interact to create a dynamic interplay. Colour Fugue I (installed in a hallway), consisted of over 300 tablets and the viewer experienced an oscillation of colours alluding to a kinetic movement depending on whether you were walking from right to left, left to right or up or down the stairs. “Melissa Alley enlivens the basement with the syncopated beat of brightly coloured squares.“ Sarah Kent on DIY: 19 Variations on the Theme of Wallpaper (co-curated by Alley), Time Out, 2000.

In Colour Fugue II three rows of tablets were mounted up high to create a frieze that compelled the viewer to look upward to the ornate architrave of the Regency property. I wanted to highlight over-looked elements of buildings and to combine this with the experience one can have when entering a religious building and on sensing something above, look up to discover beautiful frescoes or ornate gold carvings.

The Ensemble paintings play with the spacial relationships between colours, creating a rhythmical interchange between the background and foreground (and the colours on the edges). Though painterly detail is present, it plays a secondary role to the overall effects of the piece. So, the picture resonates and alters depending on the angle of the sunlight on the surface.

Loss

Loss

“Illustrated form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrated form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back in [to] the fact.” Francis Bacon

In 2006, I lost my second son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In my devastation, I left behind any notions of consciously making recognisable figures in my work. My painting was used as a vehicle to explore loss and separation. With Sudden Infant Death Syndrome aka “cot death”, one is left with shock, uncertainty and disbelief, so I found myself enquiring into notions of death and (de)parting, choosing to concentrate on evoking energy, whilst aiming to commune with and communicate “the other”, whatever that may be.

In a heightened awareness I used colour and rhythm, allowing the images to emerge. The paintings became very loose and fluid and as I studied them, I observed faces, shapes and relationships playing out dramas I wasn’t conscious of, but somehow parallel to what I was going through. Eulogy was created in the immediate aftermath, in one session, over a background I had previously made. On reflection, I could see three central figures – drawn in a dark line that looked like a man, a woman, and a child. I took those to be my husband, Paul, my son Jasper (who was five at the time) and myself. A few weeks later a friend pointed out the image of a baby’s smiling face in the upper left of the painting (see Eulogy, detail).

This approach made the act of creating extremely surprising and exciting, whilst giving me a sense of trust in the act of “letting go” in my work. The Manifestation series reflects the ongoing development of that method of working.

Manifestations

Manifestations

“To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.” Duchamp

These paintings use the methods I employed for the Loss series, where in a heightened awareness I use colour and rhythm, allowing the images to emerge. I seek to play with the interface between figuration and abstraction, coming in and out of focus through rhythm, colour, shape and texture. The work is never fixed, but in a state of flux. If the viewer relaxes their mind, marks and gestures can describe a face, or a profile, animal or creature. The paintings are catalysts that stimulate the subconscious mind to reveal archetypes, and yet, in a different state of mind, different things can appear. The images are not pre-conceived, I get into my rhythm, applying colour and brushstrokes, aiming to express the intuitive and spontaneous, whilst honouring the rich cultural heritage of my background.

As Francis Bacon said, “It is a continuous thing between what may be called luck or hazard, intuition and the critical sense.”