Melle de Boer

My practice spans painting, printmaking, drawing, writing, and music. My recent work represents a shift, begun around 2018, when I set music to the side and devoted my time to painting. This has resulted in a new body of significantly different and confident work. Within these new paintings, I leave smudged traces, and do not allow myself to repeat successful compositions. By returning to paintings after some time, or working from a chaotic palette, surprising choices can emerge. While I aim for abstract forms, I also sometimes use text fragments, or ambiguous, reduced images, which disrupts the work’s relationship with true abstraction. These shifting parameters enable me to circumvent the urge I have to seek approval in the viewer. Creating an atmosphere of the unexpected, I see every work as an opportunity to challenge the desire for control. During 2021 I compiled a 55000-word inventory of my life, Inventaris, as a way to methodically trace and understand these recent changes in my work. This invasive or even obscene exercise exposes every mundane, beautiful, and painful event that shapes self-perception and the resulting work I make. While Inventaris is a tool, which I use to develop my painting, it is also a work in itself. It helps me situate my other ‘lives’ as a writer and musician within my artistic practice, and also critically reflects on how the self can be constructed and narrativized. Inventaris has helped me recognize how I often sought external approval through the use of more explicit narrative and figurative elements, a tendency that lessens as I move towards increasingly autonomous paintings. In earlier work, the adoption of such strategies was usually an attempt to compensate for insecurity, in particular that my identity as an artist was somehow compromised by my identity as a songwriter. I was interested in hero myths, and the mechanism of idolization; due to the way such ideas present the chance to embody different identities. The fear of both being seen and being invisible is something I recognize strongly in myself, but also observe as a tension many other artists — and others in general — struggle with. I still find this a fascinating conflict, one that has a powerful impact on how artists, including myself, approach the working process. Within my own practice, I do not see these ideas as negative, but rather as generative. Acknowledging and investigating such tensions through my work has allowed me to critically engage with perc