Mel Shewan
I’ve always been attracted to print as a medium and took courses in etching, lithography, Japanese wood block printing and screen printing at the Edinburgh Printmakers and the Highland Print Studio in Inverness. My work is generally mixed media and collage, combining abstract and figurative forms and text, usually my own poetry, but I enjoy experimenting with different mediums, materials, and ways of application. My art usually emerges from what I think rather than what I see and, as my themes are often social and political, some of it has a strong narrative element. I don’t like talking about my work much, but I will, and with a good grace, if I’m asked to. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the interest; it’s just that sometimes all the talk about art and artists and culture irritates me in much the same way I am irritated by folk singers spending half the gig cracking jokes or explaining the song or how they came upon it; its origins, its versions. Or what’s worse voicing their opinions on the state of the world. I know there are plenty of people who like this, or don’t mind it, but I’m not one of them. My poem Meet the Makers, which you can read in the poetry section of my website, sums up how I feel when I get particularly worked up about all this talk. And anyway, the titles of my pictures usually make clear what they’re about. Even then, once I exhibit, once I say: Look, I relinquish the work. This idea is explored in another short poem you can read on my website. As for so called International Art English, don’t get me going, though David Levine and Alix Rule, who invented the term, wrote a good essay on it.
Because I have no formal training, other than the printmaking courses, and have never been, in any professional capacity, a part of the mainstream art world, I have sometimes been described as an Outsider Artist and my work in the tradition of art brut. Despite the regular misapplication of the term Outsider Art, there is some truth in this description. I certainly fulfil some of Jean Dubuffet’s criteria in that I have no worries concerning competition, acclaim and social promotion, and I am inclined to agree with him that much contemporary art is a game and a fallacious parade; even more so now than when he formed the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, in 1948. I once took this so far in an interview as refusing to describe myself as an artist at all, but that was really a kind of boastfulness, the tiresome self-deprecating sort, for which I afterwards felt ashamed. I make work, put it up for sale in exhibitions and sometimes people buy it. That makes me an artist.
Click on the thumbnail images below to view examples of Mel’s artwork.
