Artist's Bio:
Like River and Sky
By Bob Saar
Art mirrors the artist's soul the way a river reflects the sky- the picture is never perfect; ripples and wavelets distort the real thing. The final step comes when the viewer looks back through that mirror to reconstruct the artist's soul.
The rive is like the canvas, an imperfect reproduction of the reality before it, distorted by the ripples and wavelets so that it becomes its own reality, a reflection of the bottom of the river, the wind and the sky, all at once.
Melanie Corradi uses the canvas as a mirror, and viewing many of her works is like looking into a river and seeing her staring back at you.
"The honesty of art attracts me," Corradi says. "No amount of technique can mask the reality of my own personal awkwardness." No amount of self-aware passion hides the perceived lack of contemplation, and as with mirrors, the reverse is also true. "Even if I try to hide that which I consider to be my faults, that falsity hangs on the wall for all to see."
But it's Corradi's honesty that the viewer perceives in the end.
Corradi is somewhat of a Renaissance Girl in art; she extends her creative vision into the worlds of video and tattoo.
"I've always been a painter, I went to school for painting, it's my first and only love," Corradi explains. "But I got into tattooing right after I graduated college because I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to make my living painting straight out of school."
She worked an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlor. "It was basically work for free, take out the trash and in turn they teach you how to tattoo."
Corradi started showing at a gallery while earning her bachelor's at Arizona State - she graduated Cum Laude in 1998 - after several years at Indiana's University of Evansville and a stint at Lorenzo D'Medici Academy in Firenze, Italy.
But the tattoos paid the rent while she honed her fine art techniques.
"That's what I was doing for a long time: Tattooing here in the shop in Tempe and then showing at the gallery in Scottsdale. Tattooing was my way to stay out of commercial art."
The two often came together, edges touching in an odd reminiscence of the sky and the river. "I tattooed a lot of my own paintings on my clients."
Most tattoos seem to be red ink, blue ink, black ink, but Corradi is untroubled in translating her Impressionistic portraiture onto skin.
"Color range in tattooing is similar to painting if you know about color. I'm a fan of color so even in my tattooing I mix a lot of colors."
Corradi's paint application is to a large degree the definition of her self. She reflects the style of English painter Lucian Freud, who is known for combining an aggressive surface with blunt psychologically and physically naked portraits.
"I love the way Freud manages the exploration of a person. He doesn't try to represent them as how they visually look; it's trying to represent the interaction between the artist and the subject. It's how he manages to get such an enigmatic image."
Corradi uses a strongly modeled surface, manipulating the paint to add a psychological edge to her own portraits.
It's as if we are viewing reflections off the surface of water.
The influence of Italian portrait painter Amedeo Modigliani is also evident. He skewed faces, bending and elongating them to give them an introspective edginess. Corradi is in a similar space at times, contorting, chopping at the surface with brush or knife and at the same time bound by the traditions of portraiture and the desire to make something beautiful.
"Pretty much all the Impressionists are where this started with me. I adore their color and the fact that their paintings just seem to jump out of the wall rather than recede back into it."
For Corradi, the magic comes from her interaction with her subjects, the way the river interacts with the sky.
"I love watching it happen," she says of the act of painting. "it happens in front of me, too. I believe that that interaction is what people respond to in my work, a certain energy that comes from the way I do paintings."
Melanie Corradi projects her energy into her paintings, and those who view them pick that energy up from them as though the artist herself was in the room with them,
Almost as though they were the river and Corradi was the sky. ♦
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