Field Trip Fun: Barry goes to Missoula

Recently Barry traveled to Missoula, Montana, where he visited the Montana Museum of Art and Culture on the University of Montana campus. One of the featured exhibits was "Henry Meloy and His Horses".

I have to admit that I was not familiar with the artist Henry Meloy. First the bare bone facts:

• born 1902 in Townsend, Montana; died 1951, just as he was beginning to attain representation by NYC art galleries.
• trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, the New York City Art Institute, National Academy of Design in New York City, and the Art Students League, where he graduated in 1929
• worked as an illustrator of books, "western pulp" and other types of magazines, as well as a fine art painter
  
• taught at Columbia University 1940 -1951

Among his largest work is a New Deal mural in Hamilton, Montana, Post Office installed 1942. An image can be seen in an article at the Visit Montana website.

The drawings, paintings and ceramics that Barry saw were of a more modest scale. Early in Meloy's career he drew in a traditional realistic manner, and developed steady business as an illustrator.












New York City has always been a hotbed of creative energy. The two and a half decades that Meloy lived there (mid-1920s - 1951) was no exception. Among Meloy's avant-garde friends, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollack, Frank Mechau, and George Grosz. Associations like this had a decided effect, by the late 1940s his work had become increasingly expressive and abstract. There is certainly an Asian influence in the work as well. What I find interesting is the continual re-imagining of a particular pose, as can be seen in the following images. (Please ignore the shadowy ball-capped fellow, that's just Barry's reflection!)
























According to a placard in the exhibit, "(Henry) Meloy shared his interest in horses with brother Peter Meloy, co-founder of the Archie Bray Foundation (for the Ceramic Arts)... Peter formed the ceramics Henry decorated them with horse and other motifs in glaze."













The placard sums up, "Meloy's fascination with beautiful horses, so strongly tied to his background in the American West, contained a strong element of self-identification. In no other thematic series does he allow such a bold play of expressionistic color and brushwork or convey such raw emotional intensity. The horse series also provided a vehicle for his abstracting tendencies, almost a textbook study of the journey from realism to non-figurative art."

Fifty-seven years after his death, Henry Meloy is receiving warm appreciation in his home state. Earlier this year, Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings hosted an exhibit of his portraits.

We should all school ourselves to get pleasure out of the commonplace, for therein lie the ingredients of true romance.
--Henry Meloy, 1925

Great advice, thanks Henry!

~ Lynn

Snapshots of the Season, Giving Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving!!

In the midst of discouraging economic news we have much to be thankful for: our family, our friends, our resilient country and the ever changing seasons which assure us that spring will follow winter.


Typically one may not think of the purple pansy as a symbol of autumn, and yet their happy blooms cheer us while we shiver through many frosty mornings. Persistently perky, these little annuals are tough, tough, tough!

As is alyssum.


Tiny globes of flowers continue to carpet patches of garden, bringing forth new blooms each day. Only truly bitter cold will finally discourage them. Then, bleached of color, insulating alyssum blankets shelter slumbering crocus, daffodil and tulip bulbs.

Celebrate wholeheartedly this Thanksgiving! Sunny summer flowers do persist though crowned by a wintry frost. Good times intertwine with bad.

If you're traveling this holiday, please be safe. I want you to be here when the crocus bloom and far beyond.
~ Lynn