“Bewitching”
is one way to describe paintings by Melissa Sarat, a Louisiana native,
now living in Preble, New York. The eye is seduced instantly by the
vibrant colors in these works – oranges, reds, yellows, bold
blues, greens and purples. “I like colors that pop, crackle,
sizzle,” Sarat declares. But rather than blaring like a trumpet,
colors slowly flow over the viewer, permeating all one’s nooks
and crannies, like a fragrant oil.
Sarat’s paintings abound with detail, each square inch commanding
attention, like a picture-find puzzle, populated by fish and frogs,
crawfish and birds, flora and fauna, clearly Southern in origin. Find,
also, Mardi Gras masks, voodoo totems, dishes, and dolls. Inspiration
is drawn from a birthplace characterized by an amalgam of “French-Cajun
Louisiana Creole, Protestantism and Catholicism,” explains Sarat,
“a place steeped in religion, where religion takes a bizarre,
colorful bent that’s all mixed up with voodoo and superstition.
It’s a place, too, where everything is so alive, and the air
is heavy and hot, and everything grows so well. The food is great
and the music is great and people visit with each other. So, you just
sort of get drunk on life, and people just take things much slower.”
Sarat’s Baton Rouge upbringing is reflected in all of her paintings.
Sarat calls her canvases “’painted narratives’…because,
really, they’re just long stories.” They are a cornucopia
of images. “I like to fit something into every area,”
says Sarat, “so I put things on (subjects’) heads, and
on their shoulders, and in their pockets. I like to make every, little
part meaningful, and there is plenty.” Indeed, a great many
images of food and feasting are incorporated, along with symbols of
fecundity, religious icons, or broken dolls. Together, the images
tell the subject’s story, of woman as giver and provider, perhaps,
as well as a spiritual being, a being with darkness in her experience,
secrets, and internal points of power and refuge she guards for her
own.
The human subjects in Sarat’s paintings exude colorful, eventful
lives, whether for better or for worse, in their faces, their smiles,
and in the lines around their eyes. These are flawed characters, with
crooked teeth, or pudgy fingers, or wear in their faces. While one
painting depicts a happy occasion, a crowd donning masks and formal
wear for Mardi Gras, one can still guess at other, less joyful events
in the lives of the party-goers, in spite of their smiles. They are
beautiful, in this way, for their sheer, imperfect humanness.
In her paintings, women are especially prominent. “I’m
trying to pull out the reality of all women,” says Sarat, “sexual
abuse, emotional abuse, and the like. All women deal with this, in
some way, so even though my work has a regional flavor, I’m
painting all women, of all places. I like to paint how strong women
are, how they can overcome just about anything.”
Sarat’s treatment of women affected her use of space. As an
art student, she mastered all the techniques of traditional painting,
including the conventional use of space. But, over time, she found
herself breaking rules governing that deemed the proper use of space.
It upset her at first. “Once, I painted a very troubled, older
woman,” she relates, by way of example. “She had a strong
drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was reclining
in a lounge chair out in the sun, and I painted her only from about
the knees up, so that her feet were out of the frame. My teacher looked
at the painting and said, ‘You can’t just put things out
of the frame like that,’ and I thought, ‘Well, he just
doesn’t know women’s lives at all!’ Their lives
have so much that is outside of the way things are ‘supposed
to be,’ so much that is outside the frame, so to speak. At that
point, I began to trust my use of space, and in the end, I’ve
lost a sense of space altogether in the paintings. It’s more
of a swirling montage.”
Sarat grew up on the grounds of a mental hospital, and had a great
deal of contact with the patients as a child. A woman friend of her
mother’s took her often to the nearby town dump and taught her
how to find treasures, which she would drag back home in her Radio
Flyer. This woman once took her and her siblings to meet a former
patient living in a fallen-down house on the edge of the hospital
grounds. The meeting took a great deal of preparation and instruction
about touching nothing, saying nothing. The woman addressed him respectfully
as “Mr. Charles,” in her deeply Southern way, and introduced
him to the children. When they entered, Sarat’s eyes feasted
on elaborate walls, collages made of concrete, with thousands of images
protruding, including doll parts and glass and his own treasures found
at the dump: a work of art like no other. These experiences, including
an unhappy childhood, the treasure hunts at the dump, the hospital
patients, stayed with Sarat and are mirrored deeply in her work.
When asked what brought her to Preble, NY, she said she was looking
for a quiet place in which to tuck away with her family. She is taken
with, and indeed, after fifteen years, is very much a part of, the
rural sense of peace and community, the culture, the traditional art
forms, and the individual characters. “There is one fellow who
repairs stringed instruments for orchestras,” she relates, “and
you’ll see him driving to the post office on his four-wheeler
(ATV), delivering boxes to be shipped to Germany or Japan. Another
one makes miniature replicas of historic buildings. Then, there are
the women who do the gardening and the quilting and the tatting. Beautiful
work. You know, you plant yourself and then you make it real. It’s
just making community.” |