Kreh Mellick is an artist living and working in Asheville, NC.
Her work relates fictions inspired by folklore, nostalgia, illustration and daily habits.
Drawn from this
I am driving home from school with my mom on the long dirt road leading to our house. My mom is wearing a polka-dotted dress. I think: She looks so beautiful. I feel this. I want to draw a picture of you when we get home — I say something like this to her. I have her sit down in the kitchen. I am determined. But in the end, totally frustrated. I can’t make the drawing as beautiful as I felt she looked, sitting in the driver’s seat in the afternoon light. I am a kid, six or so. I want to draw what I saw and what I felt.
Having that urge and experience, and sitting down to draw with determination (I’m going to make this happen) stayed with me. Those polka-dots stayed with me! I still have the experience of not being able to get things exactly right. This is one reason why folk art and illustration are so important to me: I saw early on that the result didn’t have to be the thing that you see. I began to trust that I wouldn’t draw realistically, and I kept having the drawing feeling, going off with stacks of paper: I needed to disappear into it.
I grew up surrounded by folk-art images. My great-grandmother made reverse-glass paintings on lamps and folk art was all around my house as decoration. There were always folky-inspired things to look at. Cat paintings and little oddities and lots of children’s books. The painting by Henri Rousseau of the lion in the jungle and the woman on the couch in the jungle — it was our coffee table book, part of a family of images that I saw with my family over and over and over again. They were always around me.
I don’t have original ideas or ways of drawing things: it’s a conversation with all the people that are in my mind at the moment. And I think that helps me reach back for something, some image that’s deeper in my mind. These deeper images and the way they come to the surface are totally familiar. They come into the conversation I’m having with others, inside, and I pepper in other ways of seeing and elements that aren’t so internal to me as I work.
Writing, in collaboration with Backstroke Social
Film made with Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin of This Land Films. Commissioned by Penland School of Crafts 2024.
Photos taken by Mercedes Jelinek + Steve Mann.