VISUAL ARTS
BY ESTER BARKAI
PEOPLE NOT POSING
MELISSA SIKES’
‘FLOATING ON BLACK’
The figure paintings of Melissa Sikes at Maude Kerns Art Center
A
n entire room at the Maude Kerns Art Center is
dedicated to Melissa Sikes’ series of artworks
titled The Back Dock. Other paintings from
the series are sprinkled throughout the rest of
the art center, too, in a group show that’s up
through Aug. 25. All of Sikes’ paintings are of the same
outdoor place: the back dock by a lake where her family
has been spending summers for years.
According to the artist, the front dock is for boats, and
the back dock is for lounging and swimming. The back
dock is where she spends most afternoons in summer.
The show is titled after a place in nature, but it’s the
figure that takes center stage. The water and trees, painted
in values of greens, are often so dark they read as black.
The landscape provides a background for the figures, and
the dock acts as a platform.
The paintings are done in acrylic on wood panels be-
cause, the artist says, wood references the natural land-
scape of the scene. The grain of the wood provides an
additional design element as well, particularly where the
paint is applied thinly and the lines of grain are visible.
Horizontal in some works and vertical in others, the grain
lines add an underlying movement to the serene scenes
of summer.
Pointer Finger depicts a figure from the back, a young
woman in a swimsuit lit brilliantly from above throwing a
dark shadow in the foreground. In Dock’s Edge II a young
woman peers over the dock at the water, either at the lake
or at her own reflection. Swim Dock Readers is a series of
four paintings that feature young women on lounge chairs
reading in the sun.
The question of where inspiration comes from is often
asked of artists. The answer differs depending on the partic-
ular artist. The renowned conceptual and installation artist
Yayoi Kusama, for example, was sitting at the kitchen table
as a child when the dots on a tablecloth seemed to come off
and float in the air. That experience has inspired her career
as an artist, and she creates rooms full of dots using lights
and mirrors to simulate the experience of seeing infinity.
The inspiration for Sikes’ work comes neither from
hallucinations nor the grand desire to depict infinity. It
comes from the feeling the artist gets spending a summer
afternoon by the water, hanging out with family or friends.
The poses are not unlike the ones models take during a fig-
ure drawing class. They recline, read a book, sit and stare.
They take the kind of positions a person can keep for a
long period of time without having their hands or legs fall
asleep. They don’t really pose, Sikes’ husband said at the
opening of the exhibit about his daughters’ participation in
their mother’s work. It’s this that the artist captures well:
people not posing, people not doing anything except for
hanging out.
It’s not an easy task describing that feeling of lingering
by the water for an entire day — all those days by the lake,
or if you’re from L.A., like I am, then all those afternoons
by the pool.
How do you describe the way it feels to sit on the edge
of a dock or on a diving board in the moments before tak-
ing that first dive? How do you represent just hanging out?
One picture at a time. That’s why these paintings have a
cumulative effect, adding up nicely to what it felt like —
summer afternoons spent by the water.
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