Games
Let's start from your latest series "Flower Games", which also gives the name to the exhibition at the Cellar Contemporary gallery in Trento. Why this title? What role do flowers play in your work?
M.B. During my residency in Trento in the summer of 2024, I observed nature, visited the surroundings, the museums, the magnificent Buonconsiglio Castle. It felt natural to incorporate elements of the local flora into my works, objects on display in the city's museums. Part of the works come from my imagination, and part are painted from life.
The flowers are always the part I paint directly from life. The work becomes an "imaginary still life," part of a subjective architecture. For me, the game consists in bringing together these real, imagined, and remembered elements in a kind of memory impression that mixes observation, documentation, and painting.
Melissa Brown, Flower Games @ Cellar Contemporary - Trento, Ph. Greta Pedrotti
The academic path
Your artistic career began with a background in art, printmaking techniques at the Rhode Island School of Design, and later with an MFA in painting at Yale University. How have these educational experiences influenced your artistic approach?
M.B. My work is definitely influenced by my academic path. I'm a big fan of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Piranesi. If we think about the history of printmaking compared to painting, the first interesting element we encounter is the "mechanical" aspect, as if there's a "matter-of-factness" in the process of printmaking. I really like this, in addition to the intrinsic quality of this art form, which is its democratic nature.
The subjects themselves are democratic—stories and works meant to be shared as widely as possible. Of course, even European painting, being displayed in churches, had a didactic and educational function, a spreading purpose, but in a different way compared to printmaking, which is based on an "innate democracy," passed from hand to hand and eventually reaching mass production. And it's this democratic and mechanical aspect that I love bringing into my paintings.
Melissa Brown, Flower Games @ Cellar Contemporary - Trento, Ph. Greta Pedrotti... read the rest of the article»
Chance
Your work often combines direct observation, memories, and photographic documentation. How do you balance these different elements in your creative process, especially in the series shown in "Flower Games"? In some works there are also playing cards.
M.B. One theme that interests me—and again, related to printmaking—is playing cards, especially tarot cards. It's believed that tarot cards originated in Northern Italy. The Visconti-Sforza deck is quite well known and probably represents, in figurative terms, the parades of fools that over time became the jokers in card decks.
People used to dress up to allegorically represent different social classes—clergy, people, nobility, military—which then became the major and minor arcana, the card suits, swords, wands... parades in which the social order and reality are flipped, re-imagined, and reinterpreted.
Left: 10 Morning Glories, 10 Swords, 2024 Oil, Flash, acrylic and screenprint on Dibond | 53 x 43 cm
Right: Zinnia with Power Objects, 2024. Oil, Flash, acrylic and screenprint on Dibond | 53 x 43 cm
Have you ever printed your own deck of cards?
M.B. Yes, I was invited along with other artists to create a deck of cards. I drew the wands for a piece called "Skowhegen deck" (https://www.skowheganart.org/tarot), which is housed at the Skowhegan School of Art in New York. Often when I paint, I draw a card at random which becomes the element of chance that is always present in my works. Even in "10 Morning Glories, 10 Swords" and "Zinnia with Power Objects", the cards were drawn at random. I didn't choose them.
Melissa Brown, Skowhegen deck: Ace of Wands, IV, Queen of Wands, Skowhegan School of Art - New York
Last year I organized a poker tournament called "Rules of the Game" at the Center for Book Arts in New York. The invited artists bet an artwork as the buy-in for the tournament. The winner of each table received an art collection. Chance played a decisive role in forming future art collections. I've been organizing this type of "chance tournament" for 10 years.
Poker tournament "Rules of the Game" at the Center for Book Arts, New York City, 2024
Does this element of chance always have a place in your work?
M.B. Yes, always. Also because, given my background, I'm very aware of how much chance is involved in the printmaking process, whose final result is never fully controllable by the artist, who is, in a way, both present and absent. I've always found the element of chance meaningful. Many artists have explored this, like Duchamp, Magritte, John Cage, Leonora Carrington—artists determined to incorporate chance, leaving out the self in their works to the point of allowing chance to determine parts of the artworks themselves.
The crystal ball—I'm referring to one of your photographs—recalls the famous Flemish painting "The Arnolfini Portrait", particularly the detail of the mirror in the background. Is it a divinatory object like tarot cards?
M.B. I'm very interested in tarot and divinatory objects. I own many, like crystal balls and cards. "The Arnolfini Portrait" is one of my all-time favorite paintings—I actually did my own version of it some time ago. Mirrors and crystal balls are a familiar way to show an alternative reality. Their purpose is to reflect, if not distort, what we see in order to give a different perspective and point of view on objects and the reality around us.
Left: crystal ball, photo by Melissa Brown – Right: detail from The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck, 1434, oil on panel, National Gallery, London
A game of perception of reality, which is also the essence of "Flower Games".
M.B. Exactly. That's the essence of the project—presenting reality in an unfamiliar way.
Your works strike with their powerful use of color and media: oil painting, screen printing, and photography. The photographs, which are truly beautiful, are they preparatory or parallel to your work? How does this technique contribute to the visual narrative of your paintings?
M.B. Actually, I only started using photography a couple of years ago, mainly as a documentary tool I keep mostly on my phone. Nowadays many of us document everything, in a continuous relationship between our own memory and the technological memory we have at hand, as if our phones were a backup brain.
I'm interested in understanding how the relationship works between the images we keep in memory and those we document in photographs—and how they differ. That's why these images also find a place in my paintings.
What I always do as preparatory work is drawing—that's my idealized memory. Once that memory is crystallized, I transfer it to the photo and then to the painting, arranging the objects. Sometimes I photograph the objects I want to include in the work.
One of your paintings, "Black Lilies in Lava Vase", reminds of "Flowers in a Jug" by Hans Memling. Was this a conscious choice?
M.B. I love Flemish still lifes, vanitas, Renaissance painting. Memling's flowers are confined in a neutral space, almost like a box. I adore his architectural and symmetrical construction. I love the idea of enclosing an architectural concept in a confined space. I also use these minimal architectures in my compositions.
Even in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua—a place close to my heart that I try to visit every time I'm in Italy—it's wonderful to see how Giotto uses architecture around human figures, as if framing a psychological idea.
A sinistra: Melissa Brown, Black Lilies in Lava Vase, 2024 - Olio su Dibond | 40 x 35 cm
A destra: Hans Memling, Fiori in una brocca (circa 1485/90, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza di Madrid)
Performance
Is the psychological element also present in your works as a compositional element? How do you choose the objects for your still lifes? Is there also an element of chance here, or are you drawn to objects for their meaning?
M.B. The vases in my paintings are as important as the flowers. They are characters on stage in the composition. Then I add objects that caught my attention—specifically in Flower Games, objects that struck me during my museum visits in Trento.
I like the impossibility of including them directly in the still life, so the narrative becomes skewed because these objects sit next to personal ones I have in front of me. I love collecting vases and things I find in flea markets or thrift stores. The lava vase in "Black Lilies in Lava Vase" is a German vase that was popular in the late 60s and 70s.
If the vases are the main characters on the compositional stage, are the flowers then the supporting actors in these performative still lifes?
M.B. Yes, the flowers are the supporting actors, bearers of emotion, to which all the other characters are added—the objects, the background, the light, the relationships between them, the interpretation. The viewer themselves becomes a character, hopefully not a passive consumer but a thinking one.
Today it's hard to capture attention. I use color to try to grab the moment, then try to slow down perception through composition. My goal is for everything to blend naturally.
Your works have been exhibited in many galleries and are part of prestigious collections like the Whitney Museum of American Art.
M.B. Yes, at the Whitney I have a work about relationships—a drawing I made after the 9/11 attack. It's the NYC landscape without the Twin Towers. I printed postcards with the question "Where were you?" on the back. The postcards were pre-stamped and included a return address, and were distributed around the city. People felt invited to write their stories about that day and send the postcards back to me. They returned different, complete, unique works of real lives and part of a shared experience.
So we return to the democratic nature of printmaking and the element of chance, which we also find in "Flower Games".
M.B. Exactly. Even with flowers I'm interested in the element of chance. When you paint them, you are aware of their fragility and transience. They are the essence of vanitas and imminent change—even of death.
Melissa Brown at the opening of the exhibition at Cellar Contemporary in Trento - Ph. Greta Pedrotti
How do you see the evolution of your career, and what are your future goals as an artist? Will you continue the flower series?
M.B. It's funny because I started painting flowers only in the last couple of years, and it's become a kind of addiction. In my studio in Brooklyn, I'm also working on a project about mirrors.
Can we say your next series is about mirrors? Flowers through the mirror?
M.B. It might be both. I'm interested in mirrors because I'm working on pairs of paintings that reflect each other. I'm thinking a lot about chapels, sacred spaces, and the way in those places paintings are often placed facing each other in a constant relationship between the space inside and outside the painting—sometimes a distorted space. But that's another project.
Anyway, I'll keep painting flowers because they're attractive, accessible, and feel good—though they are a double-edged sword: accessible, but also extremely complex.
Breaking clichés
Simple and complex, flowers are to the artist what the chair is to the designer—the archetype among subjects.
M.B. Exactly. I'm interested in common objects. I find them full of humanity. I'm drawn to the concept of cliché. As an artist, I'm not afraid of the cliché of the common object.
I like painting the tangible and the invisible—like predictions or dreams—but not by describing their content. I seek the feeling of a dream or a déjà vu, of what remains when you're in that suspended space between the reality that was and the one that's about to become.
A sinistra: Melissa Brown, Zinnia with Black and White, 2024, olio su tela | 40 x 30 cm
A destra: Melissa Brown, Back Window (Kitchen Table Dream), 2023, tecnica mista su carta | 60 x 45 cm
To learn more:
Redazione
Published on April 19, 2025
Itinerarinellarte.it
itinerarinellarte.it è un sito che parla di arte in Italia coinvolgendo utenti, musei, gallerie, artisti e luoghi d'arte.