Mel Shewan

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Thanks for visiting my website. That’s me on the left, not  suffering from hyperculturemia, just exhausted after six hours in the Belvedere Palace. I first came across the condition of hyperculturemia, probably better known as Stendhal’s Syndrome, in Sylvain Tesson’s  Consolations of the Forest, his account of five months he spent alone in a hut in the Siberian taiga. It’s a great book, worth reading, not least,  for the list of stuff he took with him, including crazy quantities of vodka, painkillers (used mainly to deal with the effects of the vodka) and a fascinating collection of books. His food stuffs were basic: mainly pasta and Tabasco sauce. I like to digress. I like to go off at tangents and make connections.  That’s one feature of my work: a fascination with, and delight in the interconnectedness of things and where their tributaries might take me. But it’s not the only one. 

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. Apart from the mandalas, which speak for themselves, 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. 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 wee 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, I relinquish much of the work.  This idea is explored in Once I Say Look, another short poem you can read here.  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 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 and I think one that's managed not to look back but I'm a long way from taking the dark out of the night time and painting the daytime black. Though I do use a lot of black. Turner's words to Scott Trimmer come to mind: If I could find anything blacker than black I'd use it. He'd have loved Vantablack, but wouldn't have taken kindly to Anish Kapoor copywriting it.