Melinda Rosenberg



Melinda Rosenberg

About The Artist

Melinda Rosenberg • Columbus, OH
Wood • CUSTOM COMMISSIONS

What is feminine in 2023? Can one be vulnerable yet protect oneself? Can I get comfortable with aging and death? What is the relationship between intellect (artifice) and intuition (nature)? Through my art I ask these questions of myself, and to answer I use metaphor. The stick represents nature, painting is artificial/intellectual, the shield form is female, wood grain is growth and its decay marks time. Making work collapses the differences in dichotomies, and makes visual the ineffable.



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Q&A with the Artist

Tell us how your work is made.

My creative process is in response to wood and what I want to convey. When making a piece, I will paint a board with layers of paint, sand through the layers and then stain the wood prior to selecting a contrasting piece of old or natural wood. The old wood may have peeling paint, weathered wood grain or old worm holes. I allow the stick generate formal ideas, such as the symmetry that results when slicing a stick longways and butterflying it open.


What makes you passionate about the medium you work with?

Wood has a marker of its’ growth within the wood grain. That's enough, right there! On top of that is all of the variety and beauty in wood. Previously used barn wood holds the memory of its’ use and is a testament to the beauty in aging. When painted in layers of contrasting color, and sanded - the wood grain determines the pattern. It is a perfect marriage of color and ground.

What is something unique about you or your practice?

I am always on the lookout for a great stick as an organic representation of nature in its’ original beauty. I get excited when the weathering of driftwood reveals the way a piece of wood was twisted as it grew, or in the symmetry of an alternating branch pattern. On vacation, I will gather and ship a box of sticks home. After collecting my neighbors discarded Christmas trees one year, they now drop them off. My habit is becoming an obsession!