the semi-finalist is: mel Prest

4/5/2025

the semi-finalist is: mel Prest

Arrow Wing
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Writing about San Francisco based artist Mel Prest’s work during the early days of spring feels right. Of course I would love to contemplate her work at any time of year, but late March and early April in the Pacific Northwest where I live mirrors and rhymes with the hum and buzz of her paintings like no other season. To be clear, I don’t believe that Prest is trying to imitate anything - her color choices are decidedly less natural and more acrylic forward than what I see on my morning walks, and her hand drawn linear geometry is layered in a way that dispels any associations with spiderwebs. Instead, she accomplishes something else entirely with canvases revealing the same understated confidence as new growth at its most subtle and promising. Echoing our cyclical experience of the natural world, they hint at the infinite and the perpetual. At times they are whitecaps on the ocean seen from the window of an airplane. At others, the shifting light of fog. A sheet of ice. A dense hedge within an arm’s length and a distant haze. Spring’s assurance and autumn’s last gasp. They are the late summer evening chorus of the outdoors - insects and amphibians singing in unison, a hypnotic pulse that fills up the night.
Mel Prest’s paintings are all of those things, and none of them, because ultimately her canvases are for looking at. What you see and how your body experiences them is the point. A work like Rain Diamond (2023) celebrates the simple act of seeing and the personal experience that goes along with it. Nature can’t be overlooked as an inspiration for her painting (she even says as much in the wonderfully succinct artist statement on her website), but it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that the direct link between the eyes and the brain takes precedence over allusion, narrative, and allegory. Standing right in front of a Prest painting, one can see how the artist’s temperament leans towards flat and practical. Panache is avoided and the artist’s touch is reduced to the simple addition of unruled, hand painted layers. It's almost a magic trick, then, when her paintings transition from a network of rational clarity up close to a shimmering thrum from a distance, all through the use of her thoughtful, direct, and restrained paint application.

I'm thrilled to be able to share the work of San Francisco based artist Mel Prest in this iteration of The Semi-Finalist. A warm and inviting person, Prest graciously let me visit her studio in January of 2025 and opened up about her life and artwork. Below is the resulting interview that has been stitched together over the last couple of months.

Mel Prest in her studio.
(photo by Andrew Kleindolph)

The Semi-Finalist: Hi, Mel. Thanks for letting me into your studio and agreeing to continue the conversation via email. To start things off, can you talk a bit about your formative years and how your life as an artist began to take shape?

Mel Prest: I was lucky to go to a private school in Minneapolis for 12 years that had a good upper school art program. By ninth grade I had a little area in the art room as my studio, and I was able to intern with an artist who worked with paper sculpture in downtown Minneapolis. I had an art teacher who taught an aesthetics class, had us read Walter Benjamin, and write essays on seeing and whether art exists without the artist. I took some weekend painting classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and I often went to the Walker Art Center, where I had so much amazing art at my fingertips. I spent a lot of time alone, either in the woods, reading, or painting in my bedroom. There was a great deal of conformity at my school that I couldn't relate to, so I got a crewcut and hung out with Minneapolis punks and arty people. I got into RISD for undergrad and was so happy to find some people! And they were all great at artmaking and I had to work hard to keep up. I’d never done life drawing and it was hard to be such a beginner! But I loved having 3 and 6 hour classes and staying up all night going nuts making stuff with friends from exotic places like NYC and DC and LA. I never went without a place to paint after age 18. At 20 I dropped out of school for 6 months to live with some decade-older NY painters in Mexico and painted or modeled every day. Then I realized isolation wasn’t great and returned to school to complete my degree on time. Lived in Boston, Providence, and then Philadelphia, where I joined Vox Populi, a non-profit co-op gallery that’s still in business. I was the youngest member at the time and learned a lot from folks who had been to grad school, were showing in NY, had gallery representation, etc. I feel so lucky to have stumbled into so many great situations or learning experiences and being some combination of naive and fearless.

Rain Diamond
2023, acrylic and mica on wood panel,
48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

continued...
I moved to SF in 1995 and, while waitressing, volunteered at the Jewish Museum, Capp Street Project, New Langton Arts, The Luggage Store. I thought I wanted to do non-profit arts administration and learned I definitely didn’t! I went to grad school at Mills College 1997-1999, where I studied with some great people, like Hung Liu, Ron Nagle, Catherine Wagner, Gail Wight, and Ann Chamberlain. We had visiting artists, like Kerry James Marshall whose one visit taught me so much, and we had great cross-pollination with music, dance, and English departments, which created great possibilities for collaboration and overall immersion in art. After graduating I was a studio assistant for Hung Liu (1 year) and Ron Nagle (5 years).

A corner of the studio.

S-F: One thing we briefly discussed in your studio was how your focus shifted at some point from representation to abstraction (in my notes I have Lawrence Weschler’s book on Robert Irwin as having an early influence on you, am I remembering that correctly?). How did the change in your approach to materials and a desire for a different outcome transpire?

MP: I went to RISD in the late 80's and big, expressive, figurative painting was IT! Georg Baselitz, Lucien Freud, Francesco Clemente, Nicholas Africano, Frank Auerbach, Cezanne, and Soutine were my heroes. I worked with a heavy oil brush. I was into dramatic painting, and so much about depicting trauma and family.
During grad school the figure walked out of my painting and I moved into large, gestural abstraction with big brushstrokes hiding layers of writing and numbers. Then I picked up Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler about the artist Robert Irwin, and everything changed. I’d seen a work by Robert Irwin at the Walker Art Center as a teenager and I’d loved it. I could appreciate how he talked about his innate ability to draw and how it was something he had to overcome to find what he was after in his work. I realized the emptiness of me making these big late 80s/ 90s inspired oil paintings forever while using someone else’s language/ brushstrokes. I needed to discover who I was and what I was looking for in my own work. In this process, I found I was looking for COLOR. Moving into this I’ve eliminated the brushstroke and put away figure/ ground, and perspective.

Thunder Fuchsia
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 60" x 60" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: Describe the materials you use and the process that you’ve developed for making your paintings.

MP: In 2012 I was lucky to be awarded a residency at the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, who make the most beautiful Golden acrylics. I’d been working with oil paints since I was a teenager and finding acrylics helped me move my work in a new direction. The biggest hurdle in painting is getting the paint to do what you want it to, and now, using acrylics and mediums, I feel more conscious of the qualities of my painting- what is soft, matte, transparent, etc. One of my co-residents at Golden mentioned that unlike oil paints, acrylic paint was constantly evolving and new mediums were being made.

Above and below: studio views.

S-F: You’ve written and talked about your work being inspired by nature, the senses, and the passage of time. Can you talk a bit about how you see these concepts reflected in your very non-objective (or abstract) paintings?

MP: Being in the outdoors, I’m immersed in non-verbal, non-linear sensation. Today I went for a walk in my San Francisco neighborhood and the Victorian Box trees had suddenly begun blooming, radiating their thrilling scents. Watching the sky fill with fog, feeling the coming rain. Sudden dazzling blue. A few miles away at my studio I’m in the bright sun. All this drama! We live in a magical, ever changing world. Nature is timeless, creative, it exists regardless of the cultural moment. For example, when I’m at LACMA and looking at the La Brea tar pits- I’m literally looking at a hole in time. The tar pits exist in the same moment that I do, and the museum, and the art, and the traffic. This everything simultaneously blows my mind.

Rain Field
2025, acrylic on wood panel 28" x 22"x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

Oaxaca
2025, acrylic on wood panel, 28" x 22" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: We live in a world that is hyper-polarized, politically charged, and altered by changes in technology on an almost daily basis. How do you see your work fitting into this moment in time?

MP: My work doesn’t fit into this cultural moment. I hope that we are all making the work we need to make. Like many artists I despair the cruelty of the current political situation and I take action to resist and support resistance outside of my work.

Lilac Orchid
2024, acrylic on wood panel 48" x 48" x 2"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: I keep thinking about how your work is visual to the point of existing without the need for words to tell us anything we're not already seeing. Can you talk about how you navigate language when you talk about or write about your work?

MP: Thank you so much for this question! It feels really challenging to talk about the work with words so I talk about the making and the conditions around making (inspired by scent/ sound/ color/ feeling/ places) more easily. Painting comes from the process, intuition, observing with fresh eyes, and improvisation, and my hope is that the work transmits a feeling of some sort. I want to provide entry into the painting somehow and, since I love to read and to listen to stories/ books, I steal the poetic phrases for my titles.

Installation view of "Looks Like a Flavor," Prest's 2024 show
at K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco.
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: Who are you currently looking at (living or dead)?

MP: 99% of my friends are artists and I feel lucky to live in a place with so many possibilities to see art in person. I cannot name all the contemporary artists I love- all I can say is that I'm grateful to live at this time and to feel deeply moved by things that people make.
Ok, a small list: Robert Irwin: phenomenon/ pure experience; Agnes Martin: Zen, “imperfection”; Bridget Riley/ Monet: observation of nature, shifting light; Josef Albers and Sol LeWitt: setting the rules and then conducting experiments; Stanley Whitney: color, composition, presence; Judith Scott: to expose the process, the hand, the eye while concealing/ wrapping something inside the work.

From "Looks Like a Flavor" at K. Imperial Fine Art
7 Time Ball Works
2024, watercolor and mica on Fabriano paper, each 12.4" x 9.5"
(photo by John Janca)

S-F: What's next?

MP: I'm getting ready for my fourth solo show, COLOR CHORDS, with the amazing Dallas gallery, Galleri Urbane. I've been working with them for years and I'm super excited for this show. The show opens May 10. My work will be included in The Abstract Now, a group show this summer at studio e gallery in Seattle, co-curated by Dawna Holloway and Scott Malbaurn, with a catalogue and essay by Barry Schwabsky. I just had my second solo show with K. Imperial Fine Art at the end of 2024, and she is taking my work to the Ferrari Art Week fair in Scottsdale. I'm hoping to apply for some short residencies, too.

Below: Two from the series Time Knots on a String
2024, watercolor on paper, 39.30" x 22.5"
(photos by John Janca)

You can see more of Mel Prest's work:
On her website: www.melprest.com/
On instagram: mel_prest_k
On the K. Imperial Fine Art website: kimperialfineart.com/
On the Galleri Urbane website: www.galleriurbane.com/

More Prest: