Speech on "Paper, Scissors, Fish" by writer, Ian David | Melissa Becker

MELISSA BECKER - Exhibition 2009, Charles Hewitt Gallery

Welcome to the Charles Hewitt Gallery, Ladies and Gentlemen. Almost ten years ago, in Montreal, I took in an exhibition of Picasso’s erotic works. The exhibition was arranged in chronological order down an alley of flats and hard corners. There was no turning back. The first piece, crossing the threshhold, was of a nude, reclining, legs akimbo, in blue crayon. It was finished when he was only sixteen. No prizes for suggesting what was on Pablo’s mind. Half a day later, I emerged at the other end of the gallery. The last piece was of a nude, reclining legs akimbo, not in blue crayon but black ink. It was painted several months before he died at the age of ninety two. In a few quavering strokes of the brush he’d gone back, as he had hundreds of times. The same subject, the same pose. Was he trying to get it right, or was he still searching for something else? The answer, I suspect, is that for Picasso all of them were right, none of them was perfect.

There’s a communion artists conjure up when they set to work in whatever their chosen medium. When a painter takes up a brush or a carefully feathered twig or a dripping brush and bucket in Jackson Pollack’s case, there is the inextinguishable possibility that some wonder will be caught within the frame. Around you, on these walls, hang hundred of hours of work fixed in canvas, paint and wood. There are two distinct series, Flight Song and Paper, Scissor, Fish. They are tickets, invitations to that communion. They are the work of an artist with her foot to the floor, an artist in her prime. Melissa Becker.

The Flight Song series, works derived from the process of collage, but drifted out of the subconscious like pieces of a puzzle, are revealed almost as meditations, creations by the viewer. These paintings are personal in that they come from the artist’s collection of life events, some broken, some straws left over from abundant fields, some clear and potent as they day they were born. Like all mediations they bottle emotion so it can be observed through the clearest of glass, the unblinking eye of consciousness.

The themes that nag and drive creativity are always a point of learning for those who appreciate any artist’s work. Picasso, like Matisse, was a student of Chardin, the eighteenth century French master. He in turn was an inspiration for Melissa Becker. The Skate, eviscerated, hanging from a hook in a gilded frame in the Louvre was painted in 1727 but is still fresh. Rendered with such detail that it serves to remind us that life moving across that twilight to death induces in us reflections on mortality and the miraculous, yet finite, reaches of life.
With the series, Paper, Scissor, Fish, the paintings on these walls are full of waiting discovery. Some are subtle, some are stilettos between the ribs, some hold your face in a vice as a plea for attention. All of these paintings are worthy of Melissa’s journey as an artist. In some of the series, Melissa uses a battered origami fish for a real one, it is not only an example of her visual wit but a reminder that in the not-to-distant future a cut-out paper fish may be all we have left.

To see her picking her way across a reef at low tide at Coogee or Bawley Point is to see the painter at work, turning over shapes and textures, painting them before they leave this life, capturing their mortality, the cresting hill at the onset of decay. There is something sublime and simple here, the evening meal as life and death. There is also the arresting refinement of technique.

When studying a body of work it is at best a journey into the underlying logic of the artist’s life, the secrets and problems, the ones they keep and the others they hide, until in a series of slow starts, little by little all is revealed. The better the work the longer the revelations keep coming. In a few of the paintings you will see what appear to be a series of holes painted in the background or floor. Despite strong rumours, they are not ventilation holes bored in the floor of her rooftop studio by her husband, Garth, so she can breath, they are in fact portals into another dimension.

I am delighted to be able to declare open Melissa Becker’s exhibition. Many wondrous discoveries are ahead of you. What is right and what is perfect is in your hands.