Faith Art: Waves and Vibrations by Melissa Hefferlin

WAVES AND VIBRATIONS

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My relationship with my Physicist father includes regular discussions about the sly behavior of matter on the quantum level and the inability to fundamentally know everything about waves and particles.  I find myself thinking of healthy spirituality as an effort to align one’s thoughts, relationships and actions more harmoniously with the squirrelly wave patterns which are the wind and shadows of the way things ought to be.  Sometimes I imagine us as sound waves containing unlimited opportunity to be glorious in volume, timbre, color, key and rhythm.  Because we coexist on this planet, our lives’ melodies interact, generating harmonies of creativity and power, silence or (often) dissonance.

Usually when I paint I strive for an active, positive vibration of color — color being by a hundred miles my favorite 2-dimensional tool.  When the colors of a painting begin to talk to each other, to sing, purr and hum with the blossoming pleasure of existing, I get a whiff of something truly fine, like one breath of honeysuckle as you drive down the road, or catching a few notes of a melody so beautiful it stops your breath.  Samir Selmanovic taught me the Irish call this sensation finding a thin place.

My experimentation for the last twenty years in pursuit of these thin places has been primarily within the world of color, as expressed through the vehicle of traditional subject matter: portraits, still life, landscape.  A recent example of this is Sunspot, one of my most abstracted efforts.  I was trying to express the emotion of loving the mountain and yearning for the mountain’s presence and power, more than trying to make a photograph of the mountain.   After laying out the painting from sketches and photographs made in the field, I finally had to throw those all out and paint intuitively for the sensation of the mountain, not the dirt and stone of it.

A newer effort on my part is to combine the perpetual search for resonating color harmonies with an additional challenge.  I want the subject matter itself to describe the effort towards interior alignment and growth.  So far I have two paintings in this series, the first of which is Make a Wish: Serenity.   My model, a violinist at a fork in her career and still wounded from the death of her mother from cancer, was willing to help me compose an image which expressed her most intimate hope.  She wanted peace of mind.  Calm waters.  Towards this concept we set the primary color as blue, the color of ease.  To keep her late mother near, we painted in notes from a piece of music, which she performed at her mother’s memorial.  We posed her with her most precious possession, her instrument, but we rotated it’s face away from the viewer, as an indication of safe boundaries and privacy necessary for good thinking.  I am pleased with the push and pull in this painting.  Blues and oranges want to repel one another, and yet if massaged they can compliment.  The lines in the painting are all off balance, yet in relationship to each other they hold the painting upright. Being different can still be a strength.

Lastly is a confection very dear to my heart.  When the dissonance levels in my head and heart reduce, I occasionally have the unbounded pleasure of flying in my dreams.  Farmflight  is a 6 x 6 foot oil painting about freedom, individuality, possibility and joy. The model was my friend, Joanna Petticord, the countryside vaguely Southern and the boots my own. Farmflight is a little funny to me, partially because of the boisterous goofiness, and partially because of the festive phallic silo on the horizon line which nobody seems to notice. Thank goodness for author and Rabbi Ed Freidman who wrote in Friedman’s Fables, “It is a fallacy that seriousness is deeper than playfulness.”

BIO

At age twenty, Melissa Hefferlin was the only American during the Soviet Period to study at the Russian Academy of Fine Art (the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where she completed the third-year curriculum. She also trained at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and Otis Parsons Art Institute, Los Angeles.  For twenty years since she has been a successful professional painter and scholar of Russian Impressionism. In 1998 Hefferlin co-authored Traditions Rediscovered: The Finley Collection of Russian Art, a richly illustrated work on contemporary Russian Impressionism. The Hunter Museum of American Art (Chattanooga, TN) presented a solo show entitled Farm Dreams of Hefferlin’s work in 2001. The Robert M. MacNamara Foundation (Westport Island, ME) selected Hefferlin as an Artist in Residence for six weeks in 2003. In 2006 the City of Chattanooga selected Hefferlin in a Tennessee state-wide competition to paint the official commemorative mural, Waterfront Celebration. Hefferlin won the Salmagundi Award of Excellence at the National Pastel Society of America’s juried NYC exhibition in 2007. Recently Hefferlin completed a commission for three 12 foot x 9 foot murals for a large Tennessee protestant congregation, and opened Melissa Hefferlin, a mid-career retrospective of over 40 paintings at Southern Adventist University’s McKee Library. Her paintings are held in over 40 private and institutional collections in the United States and abroad, including the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Museum Fund at the Russian Academy of Fine Art, Unum, Memorial Hospital Systems and Seimens, to name a few.

Hefferlin exhibits regularly at Gallery 1401 in Chattanooga, at Miller Gallery in Cincinnati and the Paul Scott Gallery in Scottsdale. She recently served as painting professor at Southern Adventist University and has guest lectured at the University of Tennessee, as well as teaching privately. She speaks English and Russian, and rides horses every chance she gets.

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