Megan Marlatt’s studio occupies the ground
floor of an old commercial building near the train tracks in Orange, Virginia. She and
her husband, acclaimed filmmaker and photographer Richard Robinson, live in a
chic loft space on the second floor. A Louisville, Kentucky native, Marlatt,
55, is a professor of painting at the University of Virginia where she has
taught for 23 years.
Marlatt is funny, joyful and pure—she is a
lot like a little kid in a grown-up body. Her studio is chock-a-block full of
her work, which ranges from enormous canvases in racks, to delicate works on
paper in flat files. The studio is also full of the things she paints and the
things that inspire her, so there are piles of plastic toys, the subject of her
Molded from Complicated Mixtures series, Mrs. Buttersworth bottles, many
kinds of dolls and stuffed animals. There are also the tools of her trade:
brushes, jars of pigment, easels, a giant palette and shelves of art books.
Part circus, part atelier and all Marlatt, you can feel the creative energy
bouncing off the walls.
An inspiring teacher, Marlatt is also a disciplined,
hardworking artist with a seemingly endless imagination who has won the respect
of both peers and public alike, winning numerous awards (including a highly
competitive Individual Artist Award from the NEA in 1995, the last year it was
awarded), as well as public art commissions and residencies.
Following
the death of her sister, she produced The
Sister Series—a powerful work that fuses woman and nature in a mystical manner
reminiscent of Frida Kahlo. In 2000, Marlatt created a series of extraordinary
drawings inspired by Lewis and Clarks’ journey of discovery for UVA museum’s Hindsight/Fore-sight; Art for the New
Millennium. Painstakingly researching the flora, fauna and Indian artifacts Lewis and Clark collected, she created “exhibits” based on these specimens. Her work while
a graduate student as a sign painter has helped her with the many murals she has
produced. Marlatt learned fresco at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
Maine, and later taught fresco
in Italy. She has produced both small and large-scale frescos; a Marlatt fresco
adorns the side of the City Hall Annex in Charlottesville, Virginia and she also did frescos
for Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Rapidan, Virginia.
In the past 20 years Marlatt has shifted her focus from food, to
natural history, to toys. “I get bored every seven years or so and have to make
a change,” she explains. Marlatt’s recent fascination with
toys manifests itself in two different directions. First, there are her large
assemblages that are both visually interesting and symbolically potent. Initially,
it might seem they’re just about fun, but the jumble she paints references the
chaos in our over-stimulated lives as well as the larger conflict-ridden world
and points to our consumer culture where giant container ships arrive at our
shores on an endless loop. The toys are both ephemeral and permanent: interest
in them is short lived—the child grows up and moves on, yet the toys are made
from materials that will never degrade, ensuring we’ll be stuck with them for
eternity.
These works also offer many opportunities to flex artistic muscles, painting soft and hard, shiny and dull, masculine/feminine, animal/machine, etc. Marlatt starts by laying down large areas of acrylic color, which she then builds up with oil because, she says, “I can’t get the same kind of Chardin-like volume, luminosity, space and detail with acrylic; that has to come later with the oil.”
These works also offer many opportunities to flex artistic muscles, painting soft and hard, shiny and dull, masculine/feminine, animal/machine, etc. Marlatt starts by laying down large areas of acrylic color, which she then builds up with oil because, she says, “I can’t get the same kind of Chardin-like volume, luminosity, space and detail with acrylic; that has to come later with the oil.”
Both spare and rich, funny
and serious, Marlatt’s series of tondos (circular paintings) feature
beautifully painted Old Master-style portraits of cartoon character puppets (Olive
Oyl, Pinocchio, Captain Hook). Using toys as opposed to serious subjects allowed
her to paint in a traditional manner, while still maintaining a contemporary
perspective.
Currently, Marlatt is
working in three directions. She’s discovered that by incorporating toys with
natural history, she can create interesting visual juxtapositions, revitalizing
her delight in both subjects. Her richly colored and elegantly executed gouaches are composed of a number of individual
vignettes that relate to one another both visually and symbolically. Gouache, basically opaque watercolor, enables her to
create vivid, matte expanses of color.
But Marlatt is not content
to remain focused on just one medium as her ongoing Drawing Roll; Start Here, May
2010 attests. Inspired
by 18th century British artist, Robert Barker, who patented the panorama,
Marlatt began drawing on a roll of cash register tape recording her
surroundings when she was an exchange fellow from the Virginia Center for
Creative Arts to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland
two years ago. Unrolling the paper
a little at a time and turning to her right she will eventually circle and delineate
a full 360 degrees of landscape with precisely executed images of
exterior and interior scenes and cities that flows seamlessly from one setting
to the next to make a continuing narrative of her life. Aside from the skill of
the draughtsmanship, the brilliance is in how Marlatt chooses to frame her
subject, what she includes and what she leaves out. For instance, New York,
captured from her roost in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, is described by just the top
of the skyline with telltale Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge
identifying the location. A travelogue that Marlatt only works on during trips,
she has completed 40 of the entire 165 feet.
As if all this isn’t enough,
Marlatt is at work now making a monumental self-portrait clay bust that is
actually a form onto which she will put papier-mâché to make a capgrosso (giant head). A vital part of
the Spanish folk art tradition, these giant heads are made for carnivals and
parades. Marlatt’s ultimate plan is to don the finished head and paint her
self-portrait wearing it. She has arranged to spend a week with Ventura and Hosta,
master artisans of capgrossos at
their studio in Navata, Spain following a 2012 summer residency at Can Serrat,
El Bruc, outside Barcelona.
Switching back and forth between
different media and genres holds Marlatt’s interest, enabling her to produce
work that’s satisfying on many levels. A storyteller, art is her mode of
expression and her passion. She is concerned about the human condition and the
current state of the world, confronting these issues gracefully with
beautifully painted images that are rich in humor, emotion and metaphor. MeganMarlatt.com
Virginia Living: 2012
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