Aesthetics of Melancholy | Frank James Meuschke

Years ago I exhibited a painting depicting a pecan 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. At some point before the exhibition's close, this painting was stolen off the gallery wall. I've often reflected on the intensity of feeling a work must summon to provoke its theft, and have come to think that feeling 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 with 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.

The work made for this exhibition may be some of my most honest. These landscapes depict places of personal significance and are evocative of my artistic influences from American Luminist to German Romantic painters. 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.

About the Artist:

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. 

Gallery Hours:

12-4 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.