Mel Douglas: Eventide
Bullseye Gallery
Installation view
Photo: M. Endo
With a mark-making as fine-grained as the silica from which the glass is made, Mel Douglas ins cribes the surfaces of her powerful ifunderstated fused- and blown-glass works . Douglas sands the blacksurfaces of her panels and vessels to a matte grey, then engravesthem with hundreds (sometimes thousands ) of lines the width ofa pinhead. On landscape works like Open Field #6, the marks arecontinuous parallel lines that when massed, create a curved shapethat bleeds across three of the square panel’s edges . On works likethe giant egg-shaped Unfurl, Douglas inscribes the entire, sandedsurface with marks that follow the elegant shape’s simple contours ,as if she were drawing the three-dimensional into two dimensionsor recording a conversation between the artist’s hand and the curvesof the form. It’s anti-bravado art in the vein of Agnes Martin who oncesaid of one of her own works , “This painting I like because you canget in there and rest... the absolute trick in life is to find rest.”
Download: Mel Douglas, January 7, 2011