Artist Studio Visit: Melissa Grisancich

“A lot of these things are actually gifts from friends. This rose was given to me from a friend because it reminded her of me. People, places, nostalgia.”

A room of collected things

Melissa Grisancich’s studio is full. Most of what’s in it, she told me, are gifts from friends or things she has collected over time. There’s a rose a friend gave her because it reminded her of Mel. There are the cartoons she grew up on. “I grew up on Looney Tunes and Peanuts comics,” she said.

It’s not a big room, and that sets the limits. “I can only paint so big in here,” she said. “This is probably the biggest I usually paint.”

Slow to start, quick to colour

Deciding what to paint takes Mel a long time. Then, when it lands, it lands all at once. “Once I’m ready, it’s like, ah, that’s it. That’s how it’s going to go.”

The colour is the opposite. She doesn’t plan it at all. “The colours are very intuitive,” she said. “I don’t plan what colour I’m using until I start painting.”

She isn’t a sketchbook person either, and never has been. She goes straight onto the canvas. “I love that immediate,” she said. “I think that just works for me.” Over the years she has had to learn how her own brain works: what gets her started, and what makes her feel stuck.

“It has to be exactly how I can see it in my head.”

One painting at a time

Mel stays with one painting until it’s done. “I can’t leave something unfinished,” she said. “I have to sort of do it bit by bit. It has to be how I want it.”

She calls that perfectionism, but not in the way you might expect. It isn’t about making something look realistic, or painting it perfectly. “What matters is that I’m happy with the work,” she said. “It’s more the colour has to be right, the shape, the perspective and composition.”

Partway through our conversation she introduced me to George. “If you grew up with Beatrix Potter,” she said, “you would understand why I have a rabbit.”

The ugly stage

Every painting goes through a part that nobody else sees. Mel calls it the ugly stage, and she’s fairly sure that’s what they called it at school too. “No one really gets to see this part of it,” she said. “But it is important, because that’s how a painting is put together.” At that stage, she told me, she is already thinking about painting light into the work.

Blue stockings

One of the pieces in the studio began with a photo of a woman’s legs on a train in Japan. It was an old train, she said, with beautiful velvet seats, and the woman wore blue stockings and beautiful black shoes. For some reason they reminded Mel of the witch’s feet in The Wizard of Oz, the ones poking out from under the house.

That kind of connection seems to come easily to her. “As a kid I probably thought into things a bit deeper when I watched cartoons or animations,” she said. “I probably remember parts of it that maybe other people don’t really think too much of.”

In the bloodline

Comics run deeper than childhood for Mel. Later in life she found out that Albert Uderzo, who drew Asterix and Obelix, was her nonna’s first cousin. The family never met him. “But it’s in the bloodline somewhere,” she said.

She doesn’t call herself a comic artist, though she’d like to be. “It’s such a strong interest,” she said. It’s the kind of interest that has her doing things like making a puppet of Pinocchio.

“Just painting things that I enjoy, rather than the pressure of where this is going to go.”

Remembering why

Some of what she’s working on now isn’t headed anywhere in particular, and she’s enjoying that. It’s a way to go back to remembering why she loves painting so much. “Just painting things that I enjoy,” she said, “rather than the pressure of where this is going to go.” She thinks she needs to do it more often. Without a deadline, or the question of whether it will work where it’s meant to go, the process gets to be the point.

She does work well under pressure, she said, like a lot of people. But as she gets a bit older, she likes to take her time with things, maybe because she has learned over time that she should. Whether that has anything to do with age, she isn’t sure. “I’m probably just saying that as an excuse.”