Melanie Parke
Melanie Parke creates richly atmospheric paintings that interweave landscape, domestic space, and still-life motifs. Rather than depicting specific places, she constructs imagined interiors and gardens shaped by memory and emotional familiarity. Broad, expressive strokes and layered textures anchor her compositions, which often feature tables, windows, flowers, and intimate gathering spaces that evoke warmth, welcome, and lived experience.
Floral arrangements frequently act as symbolic stand-ins for the women and friendships that influence her life, while recurring bird imagery introduces elements of wonder, delicacy, and quiet symbolism. Her works feel simultaneously personal and universal—reflecting environments where comfort, reflection, and connection can unfold.
Originally from a small horse farm in Indiana, Parke earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. Throughout her career, she has been deeply committed to supporting other artists. Since the early 1990s, she has helped establish multiple artist residency programs within the U.S. national parks, and for fifteen years she welcomed artists from across the country to The Provincial, an artist-run retreat and exhibition space she founded in Michigan.
Parke has presented solo exhibitions across the Midwest, the South, and in New York City. She has completed residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (1994) and Yosemite National Park (1996), and later served as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2015 and 2018. She lives and works in Arcadia, Michigan, with her husband, artist Richard Kooyman.
Oil on canvas
30 × 40 in
The Still Life
Inside Melanie Parke’s studio
Light is the main character in my work. Or maybe it is air. I walk in twilight to observe the moon, the stars. In daylight, to watch the sun in the sky and the little things below.
Composing a still life with the obvious identifiers - a bouquet, a bowl of fruit - what I want to give my viewer is a feeling of chasing light. I’m curious how light effects can make a chimera of things - a mutation - as if lifting the weight out of what is knowable.
Cezanne’s idea of passing through objects is something I think about a lot. Even when the entire plane of one of my paintings is engaged in pattern, I’m going for a sense of never-ending transparencies, passing through walls and hard surfaces, to keep the eye going, passing to the other side of a thing. To keep looking.
I reconstruct interiors and garden motifs through ideology and memory. Collecting imagery representative of care, tenderness, nostalgia, I am interested in a practice of attentive observation. An affection for slowness.
Windows and doors give structure to the ephemeral. At the edge of these portals are sometimes offerings, material objects that appear close at hand, seen and touched with the imagination. Tracing the gestures made by other artists in a familiar postcard, ceramic or sculpture, these are a nod to the conversations that go on between artists. What was once ephemeral has solidity in our remembering. We keep talking to artist friends and mentors through all the years of literature and art history.
Flowers, which embody brevity, generosity, sentiment, center most of my work. The presence of birds suggests curiosity and wonder, sometimes allegories of fragility, sometimes euphoria. I’m looking for visual lushness. Contemplation. Sensations of consolation, longing and desire.
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