When Less is More: The Art of Melissa Chandon
 
Peter London, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. January 30, 2007
 
 
When the world just as it is, and just as it appears to anyone caring to see is so full of glorious things to behold, why bother to look at art at all? This world, nature, is bursting with exquisitely made life, terrifying vastness, bewildering variety, and provides everything we need to live. What then compels Melissa Chandon, clearly loving the visible world, to turn from it, turn to her studio, and create other things to vie for our attention? Who needs such other things, art, when we already have this stunning world? Why look at art when one may more easily and less expensively look straight at the world? If one loves seeing, why not just wander about seeing the world that is always just outside our doorway, or if that is too much exertion, peep out our window? What added value does art bring into the world? What added value does looking at Melissa Chandon’s art add to our world?
 
This a particularly pressing question for an artist such as Chandon because she chooses to employ the look of things that are in the world for her visual vocabulary, conveying their natural color, shape, and size into her paintings, situating them within unsurprising spatial relationships. One cannot help but also notice that the things Chandon chooses to select from this endless cornucopia of natural things are neither particularly heroic nor gorgeous. Chandon’s subjects are, if not homely, certainly common fare. A Snow King stand that some guy opened a while back with the hopes of making it in America, now vacant. An oil or maybe water tanker –no tractor- waiting for something to do. A VW van parked, lots of road between it and us, a few shadows. A gas station of the forties, no cars in sight, no gas pumps either. Lifeguard shacks with no bathers and no lifeguards. The rear ends of two side by side trucks parked at the bottom of the painting, deep blue sky pressing down on them keeping them that way.
 
Why has Chandon eliminated so much of the ravishing beauty of this world from her paintings? Why has she selected the burly few things she does include? If you do love seeing, and you do love the land and admire human effort as Chandon clearly does, why are there no people in her edited version of the world? And how come nothing is happening, nothing moving? No pretty things? And so few things too. Why aren’t there more things to look at? Why so much less in her paintings when there is so much more in the world?
 
The answer lies in the equation: when less is more. It is a theme that under lays most artistic enterprises and Chandon meets the issue head on. The world just as it is, is indeed spellbinding in its beauty, teeming with astonishing and exquisite forms. The problem is the damn things of the world keep wiggling about, keep tumbling unpredictably now here, now there. The boundary less cosmos surges in all directions simultaneously. The given world smothers us with its abundance, pulls us this way and that into one mystery after another, constantly distracting our attention. It is too much and we are too little, frail and finite for its amplitude. We cannot stand it. We cannot have it. We need some high, stabile ground upon which to stand, a place to retreat from nature’s wild ways. We require this in order to make sense of the world, to take its- and our measure; in short to create meaning from mere- yes mere- beauty. Chandon’s art provides us with such high ground.
 
What she does is what all good art does when it is at its best: selects from the world of everything and anything some things. And by the very act of selecting, designating some these things as special, as loaded with meaning- our meaning. Wrested from the swarming sea of everything, our chosen things, become special, now reside in the human camp, now become the objects with which we create a new world. Not a world vying for our eyes alone, but for our eyes and mind. This is exactly what Chandon does, does straight, clear, and well.
 
What can we say is Chandon’s primary project as an artist? She describes it somewhat like this. To create a body of art work that invites us to consider the nobility that lurks just beneath the surface of common things; noble because these same things are nothing less than incarnations of the American dream. To document the local small treasures within our common settings and daily routines; rescue them from inattention and unimportance. That gas station, those trucks and backhoes and oil tankers and silos were made and made well with the hope in mind that these would someday prove to be the instruments of creating the family fortune. If not fortune, at least economic well being. Yes, that’s my rig, got 185,000 miles on it, still running. Our place; about two hundred acres, my dad’s place first. The Snow King? Pretty, isn’t it? Designed it myself.
 
But it’s not that easy to see such things as these, embedded as they are in the company of much more handsome stuff that we have come to expect in paintings; dramatic clouds, lovely gardens, beautifully crafted buildings, heroic scenery, you know, all the pretty things we like to comfort ourselves with in our lives and certainly in our art. In order for Chandon to rescue from oblivion what she takes to be the important icons of the American dream from fussy, passing fancies, she must and she does sacrifice the one for the other. Out go those gauzy clouds with silver linings, out go gorgeous mountain ranges, lush valleys, pounding surf, cute kids, pretty flowers, and elegant people. Nothing at all is allowed in her paintings that do not directly tell the precise story she is after. Any appeasement to her high standard of what belongs and what does not
might offer the viewer easier, something we might find in a Corot, Pissaro, or our own Hudson River school painters. But then we would lose precisely the bracing stature of Chandon’s work; the steadfast pursuit of her desire to rescue from indifferent seeing and jaded appetites, the domestic structures and tools with which modest people strove to make their fortune in America.
 
Chandon comes by these issues and her laconic artistic vocabulary honestly; the granddaughter of a turn of the century central valley farmer, growing up on that land with lots of solitary time to walk if not participate in working the land. Later, she traveled more widely with her parents and siblings in a camper enjoying the more varied land of the mid and far west at a grass roots level, travels and seeing she still enjoys. She speaks fondly of pulling into truck stops, walking the hot tarmac, listening to the staccato murmur of idling diesel engines.
 
Having sacrificed so many lush forms of the American landscape that could be poured into her paintings, the inattentive viewer might suppose that lush color and intriguing forms, finely made balances are not to be found in her work. But the unhurried looker will find thick aesthetic fare in abundance, not to be found conspicuously within the vastness of the forms but tucked into the creases between one form and another. It is there you will find a densely packed river of saturated colors, like veins pulsing with vitality that has been drained from the vaster spaces. Liveliness abounds in Chandon’s paintings but is reserved for interces where one form rubs up against another.
 
Why are there no people in Chandon’s work? Asked that, she replies emphatically, people do not belong in my paintings. They don’t belong there for similar reasons that moving object of any kind do not belong there, nor any ephemeral thing. Trees are allowed but the may not blow in the wind, rivers enter but do not flow, skies are in abundance but have no passing clouds, vehicles are parked, no one enters motels, goes swimming. To admit a passing show into her work would deprive it of one of its essential qualities; stabilizing time that erodes both all things and memory of things once valued. Chandon’s art speaks clearly of her concern about how much of America is plowed under each season to make room for the next season’s fancy. Deprived of continuity between the past and the present, absent icons that display our hard won achievements, and with dim concern for the lessons of hindsight, we lunge towards one alluring possibility after the other, not a promising way forward. Chandon’s work asks us to pause in our rush towards an ever receding “promised land,” and pay close attention to what we have achieved, the effort underwriting those achievements, ground ourselves deeply in the American particular, savor our modest victories, our small scaled but honest dreams.
 
Chandon has found a formal vocabulary that is perfectly matched to her artistic project and, apparently to her general stance to life. There is a clean steadfast gaze that Chandon casts upon not only the American landscape, but also upon the particular efforts and instruments Americans employ as we create our personal versions of the American Dream. Nothing fussy here, as in the language of Steinbeck, Dos Pasos, Hemingway and O’Neil, no time wasted upon pleasantries, extravagancies, or comforting indulgences. In the arena of Chandon’s painting we are presented with the field of work, the simple dignity of work applied to the noble task of providing the material means by which we live. Silos, tractors, gas stations, tool sheds, irrigation canals, crop fields, motels, planted palms, roadbeds. Not the American dream itself, but the means by which we construct a civil, domestic envelope within which we and those we care for may enjoy this road that we take to be our lives.
 
Unlike Walt Whitman who also sought to sing up the dignity of America as we went about our businesses making a living in this New World, but had everyone hammering and sawing and plowing, Chandon gives only the tools and the shells of our structures, everyone who used and built them now gone. This sense of absence in her paintings gives one the disquieting feeling that one might experience in coming upon a just abandoned village, the buildings intact, cook fires still smoking. Only the silence of their absence hovers over all. In this landscape we walk slowly, carefully inspecting each item for the clues it might yield. From these few artifacts we try to decipher who were these people, what were their ways, values, and beliefs? Surveying this all but vanished civilization, we may be induced to turn our attention to our own vanishing civilization and, reflecting on these same questions ask; what kind of people are we? What do we cherish? Just where are we going? Heady fare, self reflection is, to be the project of one’s art, prone as it often is to proselytizing and propaganda. But Chandon avoids these pitfalls by her spare imagery, laconic compositions and masterful use of color, form and line. Chandon’s art takes its place within a tradition peculiar to America; seeking an indigenous vocabulary with which to describe a new nation still in the midst of formulating it personality and directionality. It is an art that has decided to shed many of its European antecedents. Chandon stands before us unashamed and unhesitant in describing the stuff of life that occurs in the West coast of the nation, in the midst of everyday life. Although there are no heroic gestures or places here, we nonetheless experience a sense of vastness, of age and aging, of surfaces baked under an unseen sun. We get a sense of grit, of moxie, of reserve. We get big skies from which there is no escape, a horizon that confidently stretches as far as the eye can see. We get boxy things stuck into or on top of hard ground. We get a community of straightforward forms leaning against each other, close to one another, but not pressing. And we also get a rather novel addition to her American vernacular; the carefully polished surfaces of her paintings, intended, she says, to keep a respectful distance between her art and the viewer, inviting careful seeing, respectful of the different roles that the artist, the subject, and the visitor-viewer plays in any art experience.
 
There is another quality in Chandon’s work that runs counter to the frozen moment time frame of her work. This is something that you have to work a bit harder to find but like so much else in her work it is there in abundance and it is important to find. That is there is a reworking and reworking of her surfaces, her very forms, and she leaves traces of her earlier efforts just beneath her final resolutions. And so you go into her work as an archeologist uncovers the layers of a civilization, finding traces of earlier forms, cruder efforts that only subsequently flowered.
 
“Borderless.” For example is a relatively small, square painting easy to see, but worth long looking. Peering over the bottom rim of the painting, an inexact geometry of blocks of saturated color, placed together as a talented kid might, balanced, but just. A modest building achievement, only a bit more than an ambitious tree house. But look how it reaches into the sky. The heavy blue sky reaches around this little human affair, and by dint of its very vastness and sobriety, elevates it to a certain level of serious human achievement. Taut, subtly balanced, exquisitely drawn, sober, polished, absolutely everything incidental expunged, no temperate middle ground, just an infinite sky resting on but taking no notice of a human labor. More than likely a scene such as this also caught the eye of a young Richard Deibenkorn. Initially he too paid home to what was there to see before him. But whereas Deibenkorn walked on and into his private iconography creating his own vocabulary of abstracted forms, leaving seen things behind him, Chandon sticks with what she finds, satisfied to tease out what matters from what doesn’t. That’s abstraction enough for her to create her kind of poetry.
 
A more exuberant work, displaying Matisse like brushwork and a wider palate, is the “Tower Theater”. More drama here in the shocking silhouettes and raking angles. An explosion of black in the form of a palm tree in the lower left of the painting starts things off, rising rapidly to a tower of pastels penetrating a yielding blue sky. This all supported by slashes of brilliant bands of color embedded in thick blue black strata – a roadway. So- common things; a palm tree, a building, and a street. But in Chandon’s world, they bulge with inner life and emit a kind of poetry-typically American and certainly Chandon’s; clean, taut, studied, a severe beauty perfectly matched to her high purpose.
 
 
For all other needs please contact the artist by sending an email: melissachandon@hotmail.com