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About Lia Melia
Artist statement
I am fascinated by the Hermetic relationship between outer and inner worlds. Many of my paintings are inspired by – even recognisable as – natural phenomena, but they are simultaneously explorations and promptings of inner responses. How does this make me feel? What is it like to feel like what I see? How am I connected with this?
This demands a complementary process in the viewer. While some of my paintings 'look a bit like' something in the outside world, the suggestiveness of such associations does not prescribe the viewer's reaction. I don't present a straightforward representation of a landscape, saying ‘this is what it looks like’. Instead, I invite the viewer to explore their own responses to what they see, transforming an outer object into an inner state, and allowing different people to feel differently, or one person to feel differently at different times.
My medium is heat-treated glass paint and powder pigments and is unique; when I exhibited at the Florence Biennale in 2003, the Director, Dr John Spike, said he had seen nothing like it. It may be fluid, or dry , often reflecting what it represents – another instance of the Hermetic principle coming into play.
I have been invited to attend the Florence Biennale again in 2007.
More about the medium
It took many years, of experimentation to develop the techniques needed to use my medium. I love the cold surfaces, liking people to touch in order to feel the different textures. I am often asked if it is an enamel. No, it isn't. It has an enamel like quality, being as hard an an enamel when thoroughly cured. The surface when new can be damaged if hard surfaces come up against it , but after curing will not need to be treated in any differently to an oil painting. An oil painting can take up to a year to thoroughly harden, the same can be true of my work if paint is very thickly applied. A new painting should be hung and left to harden. It is lightfast, and can be cleaned with a damp cloth and a drop of washing up liquid in the cleaning water.
If embossing powders are added to the mix and the proportion of powdered pigment is high, the surface can feel rough and have a matt quality, but generally the surface is glass like, often having an effect like the tiger eye stone, a shifting effect when the light hits it, making the painting appear to be different in altering lights. Mosaics are painted on mirror tiles, which again refract the light.
Paintings are presented on wooden boards that are covered with layers of silk paper and PVA glue, or in frames.