MELISSA STERN: MEMORY, MARKINGS, THE PAST
“Back to School,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, 2003

Paul J. Karlstrom

The process of building the drawings is laborious and time-consuming. Stern works on each one for months. They are typically thickly layered, with subtle color and texture reflecting the emotions that she intends to convey. The work is laid down or built up, drawing upon drawing, one placed over another. Then a thin white or gray wash is applied, covering the image but revealing, almost as pentimenti , what lies beneath. In Stern's words, hints of earlier layers that lie beneath the surface, are allowed to “sneak through.” (7) This provides a perfect technical metaphor for the passage of time, operation of memory, and the slow retrieval of earlier experience. In any event, to make the drawings look simple is difficult, requiring considerable time. And so we return to our starting point, the need to understand the artist's intent to better appreciate that profound and ambitious goals lie, only partly hidden, beneath Melissa Stern's deceptively simple surface imagery.

Paul J. Karlstrom

San Francisco/San Marino

© October 2002

NOTES
(1) Memory has increasingly become a subject of study in many areas, including the arts. An especially relevant anthology, part of the Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative series, is Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection (London: Routledge, 2002). Edited by Richard Cándida Smith, the volume includes the author's essay “Eros in the Studio,” in which memory is central to how past experience is reconstructed to create self-conception in the present.

(2) Although I have talked with Stern about her work over a period of at least ten years, most of the comments and responses that are included here, unless otherwise indicated, come from a long phone conversation that took place on 2 September 2002 and a shorter one on 20 October 2002. The basic conceptual framework also reflects ideas about image-making as a means for children to gain control of their worlds. My essay on the subject appears in Elizabeth Goodenough (ed.), Secret Spaces of Childhood, Part 2 , a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review 39:3 (Summer 2000), 459.

(3) Artist's statement, e-mailed to author 19 September 2002.

(4) One may safely assume that her figures are less a commentary on men than another acknowledgment of her own childhood fears and apprehensions.
• E-mail from Melissa Stern to the author, 20 October 2002.

(6) Ibid. Unfortunately, none of the drawings were saved. Several sculptures, however, are extant; one example is reproduced here.
• Ibid.

(7) Artist's statement, e-mailed to author 19 September 2002.