Interview with Katie Bonadies, April 2024
Mel Padilla is an artist working in graphite, charcoal, and oil paint on canvas. The subjects of Padilla’s work are mostly figures and portraits captured from life. Her process always begins in practice, exercising figure drawing gestures, because it informs what she creates. She has been a member since November 2023.
The work comes from a very internal place, so instead of talking about the material and line work and the energy behind it, Padilla describes the work as a dichotomy between rendering the real and rendering what’s not there as a way of letting go. When she renders the real it is a representation of the perfectionist, overthinking part of her brain. Padilla struggles with anxiety and depression and her mental health and uses abstraction as symbolism in her work.
She incorporates abstraction in her portraits by distorting the face using a spiral or mushrooms growing on the body, “I know a lot of people perceive the abstraction in my work as a symbol for the mental health issue, but for me it’s where I’m letting go and being free.” Another way of letting go and leaning into her struggles with anxiety and overthinking has been moving from drawing medium to oil paint. Padilla earned a degree in drawing from Pratt and she worked with the medium for a very long time previous to that. It is only in the past couple of years that she has picked up oil painting. This transition coincided with Padilla’s move to Maine in 2022 to be with her girlfriend. She moved up from New York City and she credits finding beauty in the natural landscape as having allowed her to let go in her painting, “New York is a pretty hectic place and I loved it very much. Leaving it was very difficult. But similar to all of my drawings I had been there for a long time doing the same thing and I felt stuck.” Her partner opened up a lot of new things for Padilla as far as how much she loves nature and the seasons of Maine and seeing the outdoors in a new way.
Oil paint is a way for Padilla to embrace what she’s feeling and to see where the work goes while she’s conscious of it. Embracing this abstraction is hard for her and she never really dabbled with oil paint before because it felt too out of control, “Dry medium, I could always contain and it was never too messy. Oil paint has allowed me to make a mess and not be able to clean it up.” It’s something she thought she could never do, or told herself she was never good enough to do oil paint, or it just didn’t translate to what she could do. Oil paint has pushed her outside of her comfort zone and allowed her to challenge herself. She’s in a place where she feels supported and she knows if she fails it will be okay.
Padilla started illustrating as a kid. The encouragement she received kept her in a steady practice that grew to be a meaningful part of her life. When she graduated from Pratt she didn’t make art for about three years because she was burnt out. She still goes through dry spells occasionally when she won’t make anything for months and it always affects her poorly because creating is like meditation for her, being able to focus on something, and a form of self care. She returns to the materials by stretching her own canvases. Using her hands this way also acts as a mental break from painting that gets her excited to start again.
The work she is doing now is very different from the landscapes and cityscapes she used to paint that had a lot of flat horizon lines. The human body, female bodies in particular, are Padilla’s biggest inspiration. She finds it beautiful to watch a body in different poses at different times of day. Some of the work will start from something she saw in a life drawing class or a moment observing her partner. She draws and paints her girlfriend a lot because she spends a lot of time next to this other body, but she also looks different during different times of day. Her girlfriend could be sitting up in bed in a usual kind of way and it makes Padilla want to draw.
Being a part of the LGBTQ+ community and representing that identity in her work is important to Padilla. It’s something that comes out in her love for bodies and different shapes and different people and she feels compelled to render gay, lesbian, queer+ women and non-cis men. She has gone through phases of falling in love with figures in different ways, “For a long time I was obsessed with the line and contour, which you can see in my figure drawing, and finding the lines that you don’t necessarily see at first glance.” Now she’s getting really obsessed with the color of skin and flesh and hair and all of the colors underneath the surface.
Contact @melpadilla on Instagram.
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